


Not Your Girl Friday

by trillo



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Flirting, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Other, Resolved Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Spies & Secret Agents, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2018-09-17 23:55:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 36,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9352133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trillo/pseuds/trillo
Summary: “Wait, are you flirting with me?”“Have been for the past year actually. Thanks for noticing.”Or: Darcy Lewis takes New York.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is an intro of sorts; it just sets the scene so the action/romance can begin later. As far as canon goes, I'm mostly working off the movies but I've extrapolated people's stories/personalities from things that happened in the comics/shorts/deleted scenes/things like the prelude released before Thor: The Dark World/etc.

Darcy and Jane are researching on location in the Canadian Arctic, near a town so small it has GPS coordinates for a name. Darcy had hoped, after their unexpected sojourn at Tromsø, that their research would lead them to warmer climates, but Brazil took a backseat to the Canadian Arctic as suddenly as they had left New Mexico for London. Working for S.H.I.E.L.D has its advantages through; their lodge at 72.232125, -94.247225 is as luxurious as a home in an unorganized territory can be, with endless hot water to boot.

None of their niceties have reduced Darcy’s mistrust of SHIELD, however; she can never forget the look on Jane’s face when she was watching three years of her work be confiscated by the faceless government agency that had previously buried Erik’s research. Since then, Agent Coulson – apparently having survived Loki’s antics – has been endlessly generous in funding. Darcy is now being paid for her work in money instead of near-death experiences, and has a substantial check courtesy of Agent iPod Thief to help pay off her student loans from Culver.

Darcy generally acts like she understands less than she does, if only because it lures people into giving her more information than they should. Coulson had seen straight through her act though, and tapped her to be on his team once she’s finished her time with Jane. She knows her intimate knowledge of Jane’s research and processes, her unlimited access to Thor, and her eye for patterns and analyses makes her a resource SHIELD cannot afford to lose – especially because Jane’s schedule is rapidly filling up with requests to collaborate with agencies and individuals all over the world.

So when SHIELD collapses and Darcy finds herself and Jane once again removed from the action and _sent to the fucking Arctic_ by Coulson, she’s a little lost. The Yukon or whatever is all well and good, but she needs to figure out the next step in her career. Jane’s research is becoming increasingly esoteric and there are limits to Darcy’s frankly impressive understanding of theoretical physics.

She’s busy floundering and feeling unsure of her future when Jane gets a call from Tony Stark. Turns out, it’s for Thor because Thor doesn’t have a phone or the standard Avengers-issue StarkPad (“Send ravens,” he had earnestly told her once). Thor sets off immediately because Bruce Banner has found traces of gamma radiation similar to those from Loki’s scepter, which had been lost to Hydra after the fiasco in D.C. Thor returns three days later, swaying on his feet from exhaustion, with bruises dark enough to worry Jane endlessly. He sleeps for two days straight only to be called away again when he wakes.

Jane decides this is unsustainable. Thor can’t keep coming and going all over the world from the Arctic and he’s reluctant to stay anywhere without her after two years spent apart. Jane is considering an offer from NASA’s GISS in New York when Tony Stark calls again.

This time, the call is for Jane. He asks her to work with him on his quest to make the Avengers redundant instead of helping NASA invent inter-galaxy space travel, and invites her to Candy Land, which Darcy learns is his name for Stark Industries’ R&D division. Legally.

Unwilling to let her best friend go alone into foreign territory with two other mad scientists and because Stark promises a salary and dental plan, Darcy follows Jane to New York. Being associated with the Avengers while Hydra has ratcheted up their activities around the world is dangerous, Jane reminds her because Jane worries about Darcy’s safety in the strangest of moments.

Darcy rolls her eyes. She has followed Jane into the hearts of violent thunderstorms and into battle against dark forces older than the universe itself. She has tased a god from another universe. She would do it all again for Jane. She can handle a bunch of glorified, power hungry neo-Nazis.

-//-

Darcy and Jane had been fretting about finding an apartment in Manhattan on such short notice when Stark mentions casually over a video call that there are rooms ready for them in the renamed Avengers Tower if they would be interested. Darcy is _very_ interested in saving upwards of $1500 in rent every month, so she and Jane move in the following week.

It doesn’t escape her notice that Stark puts her on the top residential floor along with everyone else, in a room with fortified windows and an inconspicuously placed panic button.

-//-

She’s ready to continue to help Jane analyze data and call out patterns in atmospheric behavior, but Stark pulls her aside on her first day at the Tower, tells her to stop calling him Mr. Stark, and asks her if she would like to be his “logistics, analytics, and whatever the hell you want to do” girl. Darcy is already cracking her knuckles in anticipation of some major… _analyzing_.

The Avengers will have more responsibility now that SHIELD has dissolved into chaos and Hydra has reared its ugly head(s) again. They will also have to establish ties with other American and international governing agencies now that they’re working without the oversight of the World Security Council. So her first self-appointed order of business? Find allies.

If she plans to use her old hacking equipment and Tony’s secure server to find Hydra sympathizers in government and multinational corporations, and dump their correspondence on Twitter… Well, that’s just her secret side project.

-//-

Darcy gets a desk. A desk in an office with a floor-to-ceiling view of the Empire State Building. Darcy has never had an office before, so she’s unsure of what to do besides ask J.A.R.V.I.S – a disembodied voice apparently running the Tower – to connect her laptop and phone to Stark’s servers. She wanders around the lower administrative levels of the Tower until she finds an unlocked supply closet to raid. Grabbing one of everything and three stacks of Post-Its in a cardboard box, she takes the elevator back up to her floor. Her office is a room with glass walls and a glass door which can become opaque at command, adjacent to the medbay Helen Cho uses when she’s in New York. Across from her office is Jane’s expansive lab, a part of which she shares with Tony and Bruce Banner. She’s thankful for the setup because she can keep an eye on Jane while she works.

She sets down the box of supplies on her desk and looks out into the lab. Jane is drinking coffee with one hand and drawing something on a rolling glass board with another. She’s hovering dangerously close to a screen Darcy knows is running some kind of algorithm for Dr. Banner, so Darcy leaves her office to gently tug Jane and her board away from the computer.

Darcy is helpless against the soft, thankful smile Jane gives her, so she makes herself a cup of coffee and sits with Jane to ramble at her while she works on her diagrams.

Her own work will keep.

-//-

On her second week and the morning after a particularly thorough upload of Senator Stanton’s emails which expose him to the world as a major donor of one of Hydra’s more ugly heads (medical experimentation on humans, anyone?), Darcy walks into her office to find three steel boxes marked “STARK INDUSTRIES, FOR: DARCY LEWIS” on her desk. She’s trying to use her bio ID signature to open the security screen on the largest box when Tony knocks on her open door.

He leans against the door frame and jerks his head towards the boxes, “Thought you might want to play with these. I’ve created a proxy software - which Jarvis wants your permission to download on your laptop by the way - and tinkered with the standard pivot box a bit. Basically made it ten times better. You’ll find other nifty toys in the boxes. Let me know if you have questions.”

She looks up at him guilelessly. “What’s a proxy?”

Tony grins. “Just be careful, kid.” He straightens up and throws her a USB stick. “Keep this plugged in when you’re having fun. It’s stronger than the one you’re using now.”

Darcy rubs her thumb across the Stark Industries logo on the USB drive and smiles softly at Tony’s retreating back.


	2. Electricity

Things have been suspiciously quiet on the Hydra front and the trail for Loki’s scepter has grown cold, so living in Avengers Tower is... well, _boring_.

Jane spends her days cheerfully bending the laws of physics and Darcy spends her time scattering her work throughout the kitchen and various living rooms. The novelty of having an office near the labs was destroyed the day Dum-E mistook her scented candle (Hot Buttered Rum) for a fire hazard and rushed in to spray her with fire extinguishing gel.

That said, Darcy still has her hands full with Congressional earmarks and NATO’s demands. Arguing with representatives of various public and private agencies got old after the first few weeks, so Maria Hill’s arrival was a blessing because she has much more experience as a liaison between governing bodies. Darcy would much rather focus on exposing Hydra and arguing with Coulson about _not_ going rogue with the “homeland intervention” part of the now-defunct S.H.I.E.L.D. Their email chain is 37 messages long ( _Re: I don’t want to join your super-secret boyband)_.

New York in the fall feels blessedly warm after two months spent in the Arctic, so she promises herself that she and Jane will do more than just sit in the Tower all day, obsessing over Hydra and space bridges. They're returning from a morning in the Union Square farmers market when Captain Rogers arrives. The date of his arrival is a secret so naturally every employee in the Tower has taken turns all day surreptitiously hanging out in the lobby, hoping to see him.

She first meets him near the private elevator when they both reach for the fingerprint scanner at the same time. She quickly retracts her hand as if she has been shocked. Later on, she will insist that she _had_ been shocked because the Captain was wearing a wool coat.

Jane snickers behind her.

He graciously indicates for them to go first as the elevator arrives and Darcy, ignoring Jane’s grin, pulls her into the elevator.

Once Jarvis gets the elevator going, Jane turns to introduce herself. “Jane Foster.”

The Captain shakes her hand, “Steve Rogers. Tony talks about your experiments a lot.”

Jane smiles, “Tony talks about you a lot too.” Tony is a bit enamored with the Captain now that the initial animosity has worn off, not that he’ll ever admit it.

He smiles back, then turns to Darcy, “You must be Miss Lewis.”

She tries not to look surprised. “Does my reputation precede me, Captain?”

“Just Steve, ma’am. Dr. Banner told me what you did about the Senator and that CFO.”

“I really don’t have any idea where they’re getting these ideas.” Darcy winks, “I do Tony’s paperwork, is all.”

The Captain - Steve - laughs, “If that’s what you want to call it, ma’am.”  
  
Darcy doesn’t correct him on the ‘ma’am’. It’s charming.

-//-

Tony wanted a lavish “Welcome Back, Cap” party because Tony always wants a party, but Pepper managed to convince him to limit the invites to just their close friends instead of the entire Eastern seaboard. Turns out, being in the inner circle of the Avengers isn’t conducive to having many friends at all, so the party is more of a dinner for nine. Darcy had been hoping to meet the Black Widow, but she apparently was “off being Natasha”, whatever that meant.

They’re halfway through dinner when Steve finds out about Thor and Jane. He almost chokes when Jane places a sloppy kiss on Thor’s mouth for passing her what looks vaguely like chicken. Darcy smirks at her sappiness and Jane, not even attempting to be discreet, jerks her head towards Steve. Darcy stomps on her foot under the table.

She _may_ have had a crush on Steve for the better part of last year, but that was before she met him. If she’s had to keep reminding herself all day that it is just a celebrity crush and has definitely not grown any stronger because of his “aw shucks, ma’am” mannerisms, that’s no one’s business but her own so _shut up, Jane._

-//-

There’s a routine of sorts in the Tower. Darcy works in the large kitchen instead of in her office. She has taken over most of the island and even though usable counter space has consequently shrunk, no one ever complains about having to cook around her papers and laptops. But Darcy is an equal opportunity space hog, so she also works in the living room, in the other living room, in the other _other_ living room, on the dining room table, and sometimes on the floor in a corner of Jane’s lab so she can talk her down from, for example, trying to create a wormhole stable enough to work inside the building.

(“ _We wouldn’t have to expose the machine to the whole world by taking it to the roof!”_

_“No.”_

_“I can do it if I just change -”_

_“No.”_

_“You suck, Darcy.”)_

Jane mostly works on her own, and Bruce and Tony spend most of their time trying to create some sort of AI, but they all revel in each other’s brilliance pretty much all day. It’s done wonders for Jane because she’s never before been in a room with people who truly understand her mad scientist ways. No one appreciates her ambitions better than Tony Stark who created a new element or Bruce Banner who accidentally made himself invincible. They don’t reduce Jane’s work to something she’s doing just so she can visit her alien boyfriend whenever she wants. Unlike certain misogynistic scientific journals.

Darcy can only thank the gods for Maria because Darcy did not want to constantly fend off various branches of the American military who all insist they have the right to the new tech and research those three create every other day.

Maria fights to keep their inventions secret and for their right to invent without oversight, but she and Maria both wholeheartedly support the giant banner Pepper has strung across the lab’s entrance:

**JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN DO SOMETHING DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD.**

-//-

Steve’s arrival puts a wrench in that routine. With Captain America here full time, the Avengers are almost complete again. So, Tony’s newest obsession is “making the Avengers more awesome”. He has the perfect guinea pigs in Steve and Darcy because Steve can withstand nigh anything and Darcy - well, Darcy is the same height as the Widow.

As such, she and Steve have been spending a lot of time together in the three weeks since his arrival. Darcy doesn’t have time to appreciate that fact right now though because she is currently busy glaring at Tony in the middle of his workshop.

“Darcy -”

“No.”

“I don’t test on animals and Thor is out for the week, so Steve is our best choice for a live subject.”

“I am _not_ shooting Steve.”

From the opposite corner of the workshop, Steve says, “I really don’t mi-”

Tony and Darcy both turn to him at the same time, “Stay out of this!”

Tony sighs and rubs his eyes, “Look, I would do it myself but you’re roughly the same height and weight as Natasha and I need to keep the variables the same so _she doesn’t accidentally kill anyone._ ”

Darcy huffs mockingly, “Oh, is this _gun_ not meant to kill?”

Tony mistakes her tone for acquiescence and nods eagerly, “Yes! It’s only meant to... to temporarily injure!”

Steve speaks up again. “I can handle that.” He puts on his mouth guard, readjusts the impact measuring wires on his Kevlar vest, and taps his helmet as if to signal his readiness.

Darcy considers the gun-shaped object in her hand and then the padded wall behind Steve. “You are both insane. I’m telling Bruce.”

“Wait, no!” Steve and Tony both scramble to stop her, but she’s already out the door.

-//-

“That was mean.”

Darcy looks up from her laptop to see Steve standing in front of her.

She pats the space next to where she’s sitting cross-legged on the sofa and says, “Hey, Bruce got Tony to take the electricity thingy down a notch and you didn’t die when I shot you, so tattling totally worked.”

“He yelled at me and Tony after you left,” he frowns as he sits down next to her. She tries and fails to stop herself from slowly tipping into his side as the sofa dips under his weight. While she fumbles with the laptop on her lap, he gently sets her upright again and she finds herself noticeably closer to him than she was before.

She squints suspiciously. Surely Captain America wouldn’t pout? “Oh, please, Bruce wouldn’t yell at someone if they pissed in his cereal.”

Steve grins, caught out. “Okay, fine. He spoke in his ‘I’m not mad, just disappointed’ voice and that is _much_ worse.”

Darcy rolls her eyes in response.

He picks up the TV remote and leans back, settling one long arm along the back of the couch behind her. “Tony really appreciates the help. You know he says he can’t work on one person’s suit without seeing how it interacts with the others.”

She nods, “Yep, that’s why I ran two miles in the special heeled boots the other day. For Tony.”

Steve ducks his head, smiling softly. “And here I was thinking you just liked spending time with me.” He turns on the TV.

Darcy bites her lip and looks down at her laptop. They aren’t touching anywhere, but Steve is warm beside her.


	3. Adrenaline

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which the question of Steve's virtue is hotly debated (by me, in the comments).

“Steve...” Bruce sounds panicked.

Darcy rushes in, almost slipping on the recently polished stone tiles of the living room across from the labs. “What? Who’s being attacked?”

Jarvis turns up the volume on the projection of CNN, and Bruce says, “Uh, the Garment District.”

_“Reports are coming in of what looks like an army of robots attacking the Baxter Building -”_

Steve runs into the room, having heard Bruce’s yell, with Tony hot on his heels. Jane brings up the rear and asks, “Assemble?”

Darcy shrugs, pointing at the projection where a CNN anchor is standing in front of a burning car and an overturned street lamp.

_“- no casualties as of now. Dr. Reed Richards and Johnny Storm, known as Mr. Fantastic and the Human Torch, respectively, are attempting to contain the fight to one block. There is no sign yet of the Invisible Woman and -”_

Bruce blinks and turns slowly to Darcy, as if for an explanation. “‘The Invisible Woman’?”

Just then, Maria strides into the room and hands Tony, who is closest to her, a StarkPad. Darcy can just make out a photo of a human-shaped mass of pure fire on the screen before Tony hands it off to Steve with a cursory glance.

“Reed Richards, Susan Storm, Johnny Storm, and Benjamin Grimm are known as the Fantastic Four. Their headquarters on 42nd are currently being attacked by Victor Von Doom’s Doombots,” Maria says calmly as if she has not just announced that maniacal robots were destroying a historic building a few blocks upwards of theirs.

She’s met with silence.

“They’re astronauts who gained weird superpowers after being exposed to a solar storm when they were in space,” Maria adds helpfully.

Tony snaps his head to her, “In _space_ space or our space?” Tony gets twitchy when space of any kind is mentioned.

“Our space,” she clarifies. “They were still in Earth’s orbit when the storm took them by surprise.”

Jane arches her eyebrow, “They’re not very good astronauts if they can’t see something as predictable as a solar storm coming.”

Bruce looks at her fondly.

“Holy shit, Steve, this fire guy looks just like you!” The StarkPad has made its way to Darcy.

Maria grins down at her and points at the guy’s jaw, “Just like Steve’s chiseled face. Uncanny, right?” Darcy nods enthusiastically, swiping to find a close-up of Johnny Storm’s ass.

Steve ignores them both. “So, what? We let them handle these… these ‘Doombots’ on their own?”

He turns to Tony, who tilts his chin at the live footage of the fight. “They seem to have it under control.” He still sounds unsure.

Bruce is about to interject when there’s a familiar, loud whooshing sound and the Bifrost clears to reveal Thor standing on Iron Man’s landing pad. He strides into where they’re clustered around the projection, automatically attaching himself to Jane’s side, and says, “Heimdall tells me small metal men have laid siege to our fair isle.”

“They’re called robots, my dude.” Darcy passes him the StarkPad while Maria catches him up to speed.

He turns to Tony, “Are we not combating these robot creatures?”

Tony looks uncertain, but Steve says firmly, “We will engage if the situation worsens.”

Thor nods, then continues looking thoughtfully at the StarkPad. “Steven, have you a grandson?” He’s still looking down at the photos seriously, but there’s a smirk growing on his lips. Jane hides her smile against his bicep.

“ _Thor!_ ” Darcy exclaims in mock indignation. “Captain America would never put a girl _in the family way_ and then sleep for 70 years.”

Steve turns to look at them, his face the human manifestation of the unimpressed emoji.

-//-

The next time there’s an attack on the fair isle of Manhattan, the Avengers go out full force. It’s an infantry of Hydra/former SHIELD agents attempting to attack the United Nations building using small but potent guns that work disturbingly similarly to Loki’s still-lost scepter.

Evacuating civilians and protecting UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wouldn’t have been an issue for the Avengers were the Hydra assholes not dressed as civilians. Jarvis is doing its best to point out the threats, but the team is still having trouble maintaining the perimeter to prevent its spread into the rest of Turtle Bay. Darcy is on comms while Bruce sits next to her and bites his nails anxiously. Meanwhile, Maria is on the phone with the police chief, trying to convince him not to send in beat cops along with the SWAT team.

Tony and Thor are taking out the agents rushing out of the building one by one as Jarvis points them out and Steve is trying to keep the Secretary-General secure on the 31st floor. It seems hopeless for a minute or ten, but like a savior in the night or a deus ex machina, a single arrow shoots through the air and hits a Hydra agent who is distressingly close to sneaking up on Thor. Darcy watches Jarvis’s satellite feed as two more arrows follow suit. She’s not sure where they’re coming from until Bruce points out a lone figure standing on the roof of a low building shooting arrows with deadly precision into the melee on the ground. She watches as another figure scales down the side of the building and runs straight into the panicking crowd, barking orders at bystanders while smoothly taking down three agents with their legs alone.

In her ear, she hears Tony whooping about his plans for exploding arrows.

What. The. Fuck.

-//-

“You should help Jane. This will heal on its own.”

Darcy tsks and slaps Steve’s bloody hand away from the _gaping hole in his arm_ where a blast from a Hydra weapon had brushed his bicep on the way to obliterating an innocent bicycle chained to a bus stand.

“It barely hurts, you know,” he says softly.

“Of course, it doesn’t,” she snaps, continuing to dab at the blood with antiseptic. “You’re an adrenaline junkie and it’s all systems go in there right now.” She pokes at the rapidly purpling bruise over his heart. It’s shaped like the heel of a boot, matching the other one on his abs. The one good thing to come from this battle or _whatever_ is that Steve is currently bare chested under her hands.

He looks indignant for a second then responds calmly, “Am not.”

Darcy laughs, a touch hysterically. She has seen some shit during her time with Thor & company, but 80-something Hydra agents versus three Avengers who were crippled from using their signature moves, like Thor’s lightning, because there were too many civilians around in too small a space was on another level. Thankfully, they had all come out of it mostly intact, largely because Hawkeye and Black Widow had appeared out of nowhere to lend support from air and land.

“Are too.”

“Who says?”

Darcy slaps the hemostatic pad Bruce had told her to use onto the wound harder than strictly necessary, making Steve wince. “I says. So, there.”

She clips gauze and a dressing protector around his bicep tightly, and Steve winces again. Her anger dissipates.

“Bruce and Pepper will have dinner ready soon.” She traces her hand gently around another bruise on his collarbone, making him shiver. “Go take a shower. Don’t wet your arm if you can avoid it, just sponge it down.”

“I could use some help,” Steve says quietly, standing up. There’s a smile playing on his lips.

Darcy narrows her eyes suspiciously and points towards the door of the medbay, “To your room, soldier.”

“Yes, ma’am.”


	4. Betrayal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know much about Coulson's childhood or about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., so I made up stuff to serve my story. Excuse the inaccuracies and also the random, smart-sounding terms I threw in when describing Darcy's "research" methods.

The day Director Phil Coulson officially comes back from the dead dawns like any other - that is to say, with a firefight in Italy at 5 in the morning (Eastern Standard Time). Some enterprising Sicilians have gotten hold of one of the trilobite-like Chitauri ships and a truly horrifying amount of Chitauri guns from the black market. They can't seem to make the ship fly, but they’ve made it their headquarters and are fortifying their borgata around it when Jarvis alerts everyone and Thor suggests the Avengers step in.

Steve is about to call out the play as they reach the site (Thor flying the perimeter and providing cloud cover so Captain America can pick off the guards one by one, Iron Man disabling the machine-gun-on-steroids at the center of the ship) when Black Widow materializes from the shadows. She saunters up to Steve, calm as you please despite the blasts raining down on them, and asks for orders. To his credit, Steve takes it in stride and tells her to stick to the ground with him.

“I assume you've hacked into our comms?”

The Widow nods as if it's a foregone conclusion, which Darcy supposes it is. She is so _cool._

Steve sighs, then says into his bluetooth, “Barton, you know the Chitauri weapons. Help Stark.”

After Black Widow and Captain America smoothly take out the nearest four guards, he points at her and says, “We're talking about this. After.”

But the Widow is already running off to scissor some goon until he passes out, which is an honor, really. Darcy has studied all the footage available of her and she rarely puts that much effort into one guy.

Darcy really hopes she sticks around for the post-mission meal this time. Jarvis always puts so much heart into their takeout orders.

-//-

They’re all gathered around the conference table in what Darcy likes to call the war room - except Clint, who had disappeared before everyone boarded the Quinjet back from Italy, and Jane, who is rarely interested in the politics of Avenging. The takeout is growing cold on the conference table, none of them are sitting, and about half of them are furious.

Steve’s anger is more of a slow burn - the quiet kind of quintessentially Captain America ire that starts with a disappointed look and ends with a speech about truth, justice, and the American way.

Darcy may be exaggerating. The speeches are usually only about truth and justice.

Steve doesn’t appreciate being lied to, even if that lie is one of omission. His jaw is clenched. His hands are resting on his utility belt the way they do when he commands authority, not as Steve Rogers, but as Captain America.

“You and Clint have been helping him rebuild SHIELD?” he accuses.

“The country needs its security apparatus back,” Natasha responds calmly.

SHIELD is anathema to Steve. Captain America’s modus operandi has always been to serve people, not a government or its military. His faith in those institutions has diminished significantly since SHIELD was exposed to the world as a terrorist organization.

He turns to Maria. “You knew about Coulson?”

Maria is (probably literally) made of steel, so her expression barely shifts at the flash of betrayal on his face when she nods. “He died two times on the operating table and needed a heart transplant. He was in a coma for five months.”

Darcy wonders how much more jaw clenching Steve’s teeth can take.

Tony is not attempting to look bored anymore. His eyes are bright and intense and his mouth is set in a grim frown. “Jarvis went through all SHIELD files; Coulson’s death certificate was signed by a coroner. How long have you known?” he asks Maria.

Darcy takes her ensuing silence to mean, _‘I’ve been lying to you for months.’_

Bruce takes the moment to walk out of the room, presumably to calm down. Thor merely looks pensive.

She feels it’s time to speak up. “He erased all classified records of himself from every database after he woke up from the coma, before the SHIELD data dump.”

As one, they all turn to her. “Phil _is_ rebuilding SHIELD,” Darcy admits, “But only a small task force and only to deal with what he calls ‘enhanced individuals’ and ‘inhumans’ - people, aliens... Hydra experiments.”

She carefully avoids Thor’s gaze. Disappointment from him seems too much to bear. There have never been any secrets between him and Jane, so she doesn’t know why Jane didn’t tell him about Coulson; she suspects Jane just forgot. She doesn’t know if he will accept that excuse. He has always deeply felt losses in battle and this was no different. He had mourned Coulson as a friend and a comrade.

“He contacted Jane as soon as Nick ‘died’ and Pierce declared you two,” she nods at Natasha and Steve, “fugitives. We were on our way to Rio from London; he sent our jet to one of his safe houses disguised as a functioning observatory in the Arctic instead.”

Steve is looking at her with an inscrutable expression on his face.

She meets his eyes straight on, her expression steady. “He and I have been in contact ever since.”

Steve looks away, arms crossed over his chest.

-//-

Disappointing Captain America is one thing. Disappointing Steve Rogers, Darcy finds, is another thing entirely.

Steve’s ability to hold a grudge is breathtaking. Tony has begun to complain about just how much he’s spending on punching bags now that Steve takes out his frustrations on approximately four bags a day. At least they’ve grown closer in their shared sense of betrayal, although Tony got over his readily enough. Steve, on the other hand, hasn’t spoken to Darcy or Maria in nearly two months outside of missions.

Darcy is really tired of being called ‘Lewis’, so she ambushes him one afternoon when everyone else is absent from the common areas.

“Captain, may I have a word about this intel report?” She leans against the glass table near a cluster of bookshelves off the living room, shaking the manila folder in her hand to draw his attention to it. It’s empty save for two blank sheets of paper.

Steve looks at the folder like he knows exactly what she’s doing and is unimpressed with her lack of effort; they don’t use paper folders for anything. She pushes her glasses further up her nose and blinks innocently at him.

She waits for him to get up before leading him to a set of armchairs around a small coffee table next to the 20 foot glass wall that looks out into the city.

They’re both quiet for a moment after they sit down. She takes the plunge and says, “I’m good at keeping secrets. Phil asked me to keep his status quiet until he gets his team up and running.”

He scoffs and looks away. “His team… More self-serving people pretending to fight for king and country?”

“You know Phil better than that,” she admonishes.

Steve concedes the point with a tip of his head. “So who’s on his team now?”

“A bunch of genius kids who don’t know what they’re doing.” Darcy is nothing if not blunt.

He raises his eyebrows in surprise. “Kids.”

She nods. “Two of them are almost Jane-level brilliant. Some have weird powers.”

When Steve looks up at her in alarm, she clarifies, “Not Loki’s scepter or Tesseract related.”

He leans back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest. “Why would he tell you he’s alive?” he asks suspiciously.

She bites her lip sheepishly, doesn’t miss the way Steve’s eyes drop to her lips. “So. Funny story… When I got here, Tony said Jarvis had already looked through all the SHIELD files and Maria said the same. Now, you know I love Jarvis - he never lets the alarm wake me up when I’m in REM sleep - but Jane always says human eyes are better than mechanical ones, which turned out to be true. See, a few days after all of SHIELD's files went up online, I thought I’d work up an algorithmic system - kind of like PageRank? - with more specific secondary indexes to -”

“Darcy…” Steve interrupts.

She takes a deep breath. “Right. Hey, you called me Darcy! Anyway,” she plows on, “I was looking for stuff about me and Jane, found some other stuff, did a few basic Google searches, and realized that the official who signed Coulson's death certificate doesn't exist. Super suspicious. And then I, um, found Coulson’s mom’s email.”

Steve sits up and says incredulously, “You found his mom’s e-mail address.”

Darcy can practically see the dash between ‘e’ and ‘mail’ when he says the word. It’s charming.

She nods, “I couldn’t find anything on Coulson because he erased everything about himself post-high school - he did terrible on the Reading section of the SAT by the way -”

“Darcy,” he interrupts her again.

“Don’t interrupt me, Rogers,” Darcy says because she won’t stand for a man interrupting her even if that man is Captain America. She continues, “So I found his mom on Goodreads and broke into their server to get her email because you know me, can’t leave well enough alone.” She laughs. “His mom’s really old and teaches tenth grade now, but she’s _so_ badass. SHIELD files show that she was in regular contact with Fury until he 'died', so I assumed he would have told her if her son were alive but unable to contact her himself. I emailed her to see if she knew anything, sent her multiple selfies of me and Thor, promised (and later sent) her a photo of you on the treadmill without a shirt on like she requested, and she finally let me talk to her and told me about Phil. He, like, came back to life and stuff. He’d love to tell you the story.”

Steve, who sat up ramrod straight after she mentioned his shirtless photo, relaxes again and says, “And you’ve been helping him since then?”

“Here and there. He asked me to join his team a few times, said I’m an asset,” Darcy preens a little. “But I’m happy here.” She gestures around at the general mess of the living room - Steve’s shield propped up against the large couch, an oddly shaped robot Jane made puttering around the kitchen, her purse with its contents spilling out on the kitchen island, Thor’s Hammer resting on a tin of his favorite cookies on the coffee table in front of them.

Steve looks around the room too, then sighs. “When were you planning to tell us?”

“I wasn’t. Phil would have come himself when he was ready. He and Maria - they never meant to deceive you guys.”

“And yet,” he says.

“Steve,” Darcy says quietly. “They’re spies. Phil is _the_ spy now. And he loves SHIELD - SHIELD as it was meant to be.”

Steve drops his head, looking down at his hands. “He loves SHIELD, huh?”

“He would marry SHIELD if he could.”

Steve huffs out a short laugh, then leans forward to tug half-heartedly at Mjölnir. The Hammer doesn't budge. “I don’t like being lied to. I can’t lead this team - _us_ \- if I don’t know things like this. If we don’t _all_ know. If we’re not on equal footing.”

He looks up at her, then says seriously, “No more secrets.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Darcy promises.

He smiles, “Maybe not the second part. Who else would take shirtless pictures of me?”

She tilts her head. “You offering more?”

“Only if you get my good side.”

There’s not a smirk or indication of teasing on his face. Darcy never knows what to make of his sincerity when he says things like this, so she just shakes her head indulgently. Then, she gets up and gestures vaguely at the kitchen. “I’m going to make a sandwich. You want?”

She brushes her fingers lightly across the back of his neck as she walks past the armchair he’s sitting in, almost like an accident, and hears him groan, “I want.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That was a lot of exposition.


	5. Flirts

Natasha Romanoff has been living in the Tower for three weeks and Darcy has not sat comfortably for about the same amount of time.

Three months after Coulson’s resurrection came to light, Natasha came back to the Tower after a mission and just… stayed. She brought with her Clint Barton, who currently has a front row seat to Darcy’s self-inflicted misery.

When she told Natasha about the Krav Maga classes she had taken as an undergraduate at Culver, Natasha decided she had _potential_. Having potential means 6 AM meets in what Jane refers to as the “recreational gym”. It doesn’t have the obstacle course Tony dreamt up to make it easier for the Avengers to practice fighting together like the other gym, but it is equipped with four treadmills overlooking the city, machines and weight training sets that delight Thor every day, and a boxing ring. It is on this heavily padded boxing ring that Darcy “increases her potential” with Natasha every other day to Clint’s endless glee.

“Keep your knees bent and _roll_ ,” Natasha reminds her patiently after she smoothly flips Darcy over her head.

Clint cackles in the background as she hits the floor with a thud.

She takes solace from the floor's cool, filthy padding for a moment then nods up at Natasha, who is smiling softly down at her. She stands up, blinking rapidly to clear the spots dancing in her eyes, then points at Clint, “If you won’t make yourself useful, Barton, get the hell out.”

Clint, ostensibly lifting weights, raises the dumbbell in his hand innocently. “I’m working out, same as you.”

Darcy lobs a medicine ball at his head just as Pepper enters the gym, the picture of athletic perfection. She rolls out her yoga mat as she says archly, “If I have to hold another company-wide, mandatory workshop on gym safety, I will.”

A few weeks ago, Steve and Thor had burst through the glass wall of the training room in their enthusiasm for sparring. They hadn’t stopped fighting until Thor pulled them out of the fall just before they hit the ground directly in front of the main entrance to the Tower. The tabloids had gone wild about a secret feud between them for, like, a whole week after.

Tony had put in padded steel bars just inside the glass wall during the repairs.

Darcy looks on as Pepper finishes stretching and spreads her limbs out into a perfect triangle pose.

 _Californians_.

-//-

Late one night, they all gather around the swanky fireplace in the main, sunken living room to play poker. Most of them anyway. Jane is spread out across the couch, her head on Thor’s lap as she checks NASA’s website top to bottom for updates because that’s what she finds relaxing. Pepper is on the floor, leaning against Tony’s legs. She’s looking for new art pieces on the market. She keeps shoving the StarkPad under Tony’s nose to see if he’s interested in this piece or that. Darcy suspects she’s trying to distract him so Maria wins this round since they’ve secretly agreed to split the pot. The pot consists of collateral such as a choice bottle of Hausen beer that Sam Wilson - currently visiting from D.C. -  brought from his recent mysterious trip to Germany, among other things.

When Pepper once again breaks Tony’s concentration to show him a new Banksy even though they all agree Banksy is overrated, he shouts, “Cheating! This is cheating!”

“You’re just mad ‘cause you’re losing, man,” Sam drawls.

“Only because Pep is -” Tony starts, but Sam slaps his cards down on the coffee table and sits back on the couch, a shit-eating grin on his face. His hand is pretty good, but not as good as Darcy's.

Then Natasha reveals her cards and Sam’s smug grin vanishes.

Darcy looks at her own cards and huffs, “Fuck this!” She just lost her best pair of sunglasses. They’re shaped like sunflowers.

“Language,” Steve says from the couch, idly turning a page of _The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam_.

Darcy rolls her eyes at him even though he doesn’t look up from his book. “Sorry, _dad_.”

Tony has never looked more thrilled. “If you wanted to call Steve ‘daddy’, Darce, all you had to do was ask.” He wiggles his eyebrows at her before taking a long sip of his beer.

Steve doesn’t seem to understand the specifics of this particular sexual euphemism, but a blotchy, red flush spreads heavy on his cheeks anyway.

“I do not understand this game,” Thor sets down his own cards slowly, looking contemplative.  “Why should not Natasha ‘count cards’ as you call it? On Asgard, using your skills to best games is encouraged.”

Everyone turns to Natasha at the same time, looking accusatory. She throws up her hands and starts to repeat, “Using your skills to best games -”

She’s cut off when six of them throw cushions at her face.

Jane just looks very smug that her otherworldly boyfriend, a novice poker player, can already spot card counters.

**-//-**

Later still, Darcy is in bed and enjoying the cool summer breeze floating in through her window, when Jarvis says over the intercom calmly, “Miss Lewis, I regret to inform you that there has been a breach of security at Oscorp Industries. Miss Hill would like you to join her at command central at your earliest convenience.”

It takes her a moment to process Jarvis’ words before she springs into action. She hurries back into her jeans and sneakers, leaving her pyjama top on, and swipes her phone from the nightstand on the way out.

In her haste, she forgets to follow emergency protocol and press the panic button, which secures the room digitally and shields the floor to ceiling windows with SI’s nearly indestructible Vanadium steel alloy.

**-//-**

By the time she reaches command one floor up from the living quarters, Maria is already at her station and Bruce is pacing around the room as is his habit during missions the Hulk is not part of. Jane is scanning Jarvis’ satellite feed with Sam, who is sitting this one out since his armor is back in D.C.

She first runs into Clint, who is shoving extra arrowheads into hidden compartments in his suit.

“Status?” she asks him as she hands him more arrows from the weapons locker.

“Some assholes broke into Oscorp. Hill thinks they could be after some chemical that the papers found out about last week.”

“A chemical that creates hybrids, if Hill is right,” Steve adds, coming up behind her to grab his cowl from his locker. He’s in his stealth suit - dark navy with rich, brown leather straps to hold his shield. It’s Darcy’s favorite. But no one needs to know that.

“She usually is, but this time we have no way of knowing exactly what it is or what it does,” Natasha says from behind her locker door. “Or if that is even what they’re after. Oscorp has never been transparent with their experiments.”

Darcy doesn’t see Tony. “Stark’s on recon?”

Steve nods, “I’m heading over with Thor as soon as he’s done. They’ll come back for Romanoff and Barton.”

It makes sense to stagger their entrance since the building is down the street and travel time is short via the skies. She puts on the bluetooth she picked up from her desk on her way in so she can listen to Tony’s scoping report. At first, all she hears is Tony rattling off some specs, so it takes her a few seconds to catch up to speed. An unknown entity has broken into Oscorp whose CEO is currently overseas. Whoever it is doesn’t seem to be alien or possess any alien technology. Jarvis’ scan of the building places 10 unknown heat signatures in the BioLab, 25 stories up. Rumors put all sorts of crazy chemical mixtures and hybrid experiments on that floor. The intruders seem to be taking their sweet time looking through everything, and Maria stresses the importance of discretion. Nobody wants to spook the crazies into doing something drastic when they seem unaware that Ironman has landed on the roof of a nearby building.

She continues mentally cataloging Tony’s intel as she walks with Steve to the landing pad. Thor is ready with Mjölnir and being briefed by Maria.

She turns to Steve and tells him sternly, as she always does, “Don’t be a hero.” He has almost no sense of self-preservation when he’s fighting.

He curls his hand gently around her shoulder and responds, as he always does, “I’ll try my best, ma’am.”

Over the comms, she hears Tony say loudly into her ear, “Recon complete. If you’re done flirting, Cap, I need someone keeping watch while I get the others. ETA: ten minutes.”

Darcy and Steve, having swayed closer and closer together during their exchange, jump apart. Her shoulder burns where Steve touched her.

Once her brain registers what Tony said, Darcy's eyes widen and she asks, “Wait, are you flirting with me?”

Steve sighs and says wryly, “Have been for the past year actually. Thanks for noticing.”

He and Thor take off before she can respond.

-//-

Even later into the night, Darcy and Maria trudge back to their rooms, leaving the team in Jarvis’ capable but metaphorical hands. The surprise mission went well and the debrief can wait. Darcy had called to the scene the special NYPD task force that handles unusual crimes (mostly Avengers related), which now has custody of the intruders. Turns out, they were after a machine that could possibly turn people into giant animal hybrids at their will, though it has yet to be tested.

Darcy is barely conscious enough to plug in her phone to charge and definitely not conscious enough to change back into her pyjamas. She passes out as soon as she collapses into bed, curling up under the blankets to negate the chill coming from the open window that she is too tired to close.

-//-

By the time Jarvis alerts Tony of her absence and Jane nearly breaks down the door to get into her room, half her furniture is upturned, there’s a jagged hole in the glass wall, and Darcy is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well... What happens now?


	6. Masquerade

There’s an incessant itch under Darcy’s knee. It’s irritating her to no end, but she can’t get to it, tied up as she is to a hard-backed, wooden chair because her life is a cliché.

Her wrists are tied together behind her and then tied to the chair itself. Mercifully, her legs are untied. Whoever kidnapped her used an excessive amount of rope; they’re evidently not working within a budget. Even Tony Stark has budgets.

Speaking of Tony, it’s probably time to try to reach for the bluetooth earpiece. She fell asleep with it tucked in her ear after the mission; clearly, sitting with gross silicone in her ear for 20 minutes so Tony could shape the bluetooth specifically for her ears was worth it. The tiny thing stayed in her ear the whole time she was running around her room, trying to club the two bad guys with one of the weird stone sculptures Pepper likes to decorate with. She’ll never again complain about the heron sculpture that stands creepily off to the side of her TV console. She’s pretty sure she permanently blinded one of her aggressors with its beak.

The bluetooth flew out of her ear and skittered to a stop a few feet away from her when one of the assholes backhanded her for getting mouthy. They didn’t notice.

She couldn’t help herself; they were talking about her like she wasn’t in the room, which is so rude. She supposes she shouldn’t expect manners from people idiotic enough not to search her before tying her up. Not that that helps her at all since she doesn’t have anything on her, not even her baby taser. Not even her shoes.

She looks around the room one more time to take stock of just exactly how fucked she is. She’s in a small, square cell. Everything is cement or stone, save for the bars on the small, rectangular window 10 feet up the wall. Those are steel. The weak sunlight streaming in tells her that it’s either dawn or sunset. She hopes it’s dawn; she shudders to think what this cell would be like in complete darkness. Although, sleep would be a welcome respite from the pain. She was knocked out during the transition from her room to wherever this hellhole is - there’s no way to tell for how long - but it wasn’t exactly restful sleep.

She thinks she can activate the tracker on the bluetooth with a toe if she can just get to it. Her right leg is tantalizingly close to the earpiece. Unfortunately, a shooting pain rushes up her ankle when she tries to move her foot, so she forces herself to face the condition of her body.

Darcy starts from the top.

She has a wicked headache, most likely from whatever chemical they used to knock her out. Her cheekbone hurts from being slapped. Her arms are sore from being pulled back tightly for so long. She rubbed her wrists raw trying to break the rope. Given the pain, she has definitely sprained her ankle.

Everything else seems to be in workable shape. She’s attempting to move her leg towards the bluetooth again when the door to the cell slides open with a mechanical swooping sound.

She is so extraordinarily _fucked._

-//-

4,667 miles away from that little cell, Steve stands in front of the glass walls of the living room. He looks out into the city, not really seeing anything. His arms are crossed behind his back, his hands curled into tight fists.

It’s been 28 hours since they realized Darcy was taken. Countless hours since Thor returned from Asgard with the news that Heimdall is having difficulty locating her, since Bruce tested the blood splatters in Darcy’s room and came to the not-entirely-heartening conclusion that none of the blood was hers, since Jane took the samples to run the tests herself, since Steve last spoke.

Darcy’s two laptops and phone were destroyed in the attack, and Tony’s thorough search of her Stark Industries email yielded nothing out of the ordinary. Maria, finding nothing on Darcy's desk, is still looking through traffic and airport security footage. In the meantime, they combed through Darcy's small sitting room for the second time, gleaning nothing new, which only served to frustrate Steve further. So when Natasha tells him they’re going to look through Darcy’s bedroom and bathroom, he silently follows her.

Looking at the mess of Darcy’s sitting room physically pains him, so he keeps his eyes straight ahead and ignores everything in his periphery. Before now, they held off looking through her bedroom for which Steve was grateful. But it would be foolish of them to keep putting it off. Regardless, it’s an egregious invasion of her privacy on his part, not least because he’s never been invited to her suite before, much less her bedroom.

They’re not sure what they’re looking for, which makes it all the more worse. Jane heads straight for her walk-in closet, while Natasha goes for her bathroom. Tony and Bruce are hovering by her messy desk, and Clint is looking under her bed. Steve gravitates towards the floor length mirror next to her dresser. There are photos and Post-Its and old cinema tickets from her outings with Natasha stuck around the edges. She’s drawn a large heart in one corner with what seems to be lipstick. Pasted inside the heart is a photo of her with Jane, Thor, and Erik Selvig. Darcy calls these types of photos 'selfies'.

Turning away, Steve approaches her dresser slowly. It’s piled high with… everything. He sees books, little pots and tubes of make-up, a pair of tennis shoes tilted on their side, a small cactus, and the light, lacy summer robe she wears over her pyjama shorts around the common rooms. It’s practically transparent and has driven Steve to madness on more than one occasion.

Half hidden under the robe is her StarkPad. He pulls it out, careful not to dislodge anything else. One corner of the tablet is chipped because she refuses to get a protective cover for it, even though she drops it constantly. He turns it over and rubs his thumb across the engraving in the back: _Darcy K. Lewis_. Steve didn’t even know she had a middle name.

Swallowing hard, he walks over to Tony and hands him the tablet wordlessly. Clint is sitting at her desk, going through Darcy’s little messenger bag with an air of familiarity that makes Steve grind his teeth in annoyance.

He goes back to the dresser. There’s nothing of significance on top, so he starts on the drawers. The first one is filled with hats of all kinds - winter caps with bobbles, a wide brimmed sun hat crushed under a photo album he dare not touch. He opens the second drawer.

It takes him a moment to realize what all the lace and patterned cotton is. His cheeks heat and he feels sick to his stomach in a way he hasn’t since the serum. He bangs the drawer shut and stalks out of her room.

Tony catches up to him just as he crosses the threshold into the hallway outside Darcy’s suite and places a hand on his shoulder. Steve shrugs it off irritably.

“We’re not done yet,” Tony says quietly.

Steve whirls around angrily. “I am. I’m done. None of this is getting us anywhere close to finding her.”

Tony's demeanor changes. He crosses his arms across his chest and says coolly, “And what do you plan to do? We don't have any leads.”

“Something more than this.” Steve spits out, gesturing at everyone standing around the door. He can’t help but add, just to rile Tony up, “More than you.”

Tony’s arms drop and his hands clench into fists. There is anger in his eyes. “You are _not_ the only one who cares about Darcy.”

“No, but it looks like I’m the only one willing to actually _do_ anything. I’m done sitting on my ass.”

He storms out as everyone watches.

-//-

Opening her eyes is a feat. It requires a level of effort Darcy can't remember ever using. It turns out to be a good idea though because she finds herself in familiar surroundings.

Soothing cream walls, softly beeping machinery, an armchair and ottoman with the same pale blue herringbone pattern next to her bed, a rolling console table with a pale pink jug on top. She can just make out the ice chips inside.

A hospital then, not Helen Cho’s medbay.

Darcy sweeps her eyes over her body. Her right leg is elevated and in a cast; there's a strap across her collarbone. It seems she's broken both, so a hospital makes sense. Her injuries are too extensive for the Tower’s small medbay. They must have her on the good stuff - even her broken leg hardly aches.

She feels a headache coming on, but she sets that aside to concentrate for a bit longer. Something is bothering her. The last thing she can remember is a large figure looming over her while she was tied to the chair in that cell.

Aside from that, she's doing okay and not in immediate danger of, like, dying. Still, she's a bit miffed no one is sitting devotedly next to her bed, waiting for her to wake up, like people do in movies.

Darcy should probably tell someone she's awake. She lifts a trembling hand to press the call button she knows is on the side of the rail of her bed, but it isn't there. _Strange._ All hospital equipment is more or less standard since they're made by the same few companies. This is not her first rodeo; she knows how hospitals work.

She thinks maybe it's on the other side; she'll look soon. She needs to close her eyes for a moment first; she’s so tired. She figures out what is bothering her just before she drifts off to sleep. The room doesn't smell like antiseptic, like medicinal alcohol, or even like sanitized plastic.

It smells dusty.

-//-

The next time Darcy is lucid enough to open her eyes, Jane is sitting next to her on the pale blue armchair. The rush of relief Darcy feels momentarily leaves her breathless.

“ _Jane._ ”

Jane whips her head up from her tablet to look at Darcy, and smiles. She sets her tablet down on the bed and leans over her. “You’re awake! Thank god. It was touch and go there for a while, and we were all so worried.” She hands Darcy a disposable cup full of crushed ice.

Darcy takes a sip. _Oh, right._ “How is everyone? I can’t remember what -”

“Everyone is fine.” Jane says quickly. “The AI found you, but don’t worry about that now. We’ll fill you in as soon as you’re back to 100%.”

So, Jarvis found her. “Okay.”

She leans back against her pillows again. It feels like she hasn't been touched in ages. She reaches out for Jane’s hand, looking for a little physical affection. Jane retracts hers quickly, picking up her tablet again. Darcy, feeling hurt, slowly lays her hand back on her stomach.

She’s asleep in less than a minute.

-//-

Darcy feels much better the next time she wakes. It’s dawn and to her disappointment, the armchair beside her bed is empty again.

-//-

On her fifth day at the hospital, Jane stays with her the whole day and through the night. They catch up on their Netflix shows on the big TV affixed to the wall opposite her bed. They carefully avoid any mention of the Incident.

Jane is not as receptive to Darcy’s chatter as she used to be, seeming annoyed by everything Darcy says. She supposes her disappearance took a toll on everyone, so she stays quiet.

It's strange that no one else has been in to see her or that Tony hasn’t yet forced her to drink the weird health shakes he makes everyone drink after missions. She wonders if her parents even know. She hasn't seen a nurse or doctor so far. Jane says they prefer to attend to her at night when she’s asleep and have limited her visitors. They don’t want to cause her “undue mental stress”. She tries not to let that bother her - or the fact that Jane apparently washes her hair and gives her sponge baths when she’s asleep.

Her head doesn’t hurt at all on the sixth day, so she asks Jane for her phone. Jane says it, along with her laptop and tablet, was ruined during the Incident. Tony is working on recovering and transferring her files to new ones when he’s not busy trying to find whoever kidnapped her. Apparently, they still don’t know.

“Tell me when they find out. I’d like to give the assholes a piece of my mind, if you know what I mean.”

Jane smiles fondly at her. “Will do.”

Darcy smiles back. She shifts further into her pillows and quietly watches Jane.

Jane puts down the book she's reading - _Catcher in the Rye,_ which is odd. Jane doesn't read fiction, much less novels about entitled boys who squander opportunities other people would kill for.

Jane turns to her, looking concerned. “Is something wrong, sweetie?”

Again, odd. Jane is not known for using terms of endearment.

Darcy shakes her head. “No, I'm fine. Just… thinking about all the shows I can finally catch up on.” She doesn't know why she lies.

-//-

The next morning, Jane arrives with breakfast and a Mac. She sets them on the table in front of her and says, “Morning, sunshine! I know you’re bored, so I got this for you while your ones are being repaired.”

“Oh my god, _bless you_!” Darcy says brightly. There’s only so much House of Cards she can watch before she tires of Frank’s machinations.

Jane settles next to her, picking up her book again. Darcy eats her breakfast in silence; it’s oatmeal and fruit, just like it’s been every day for the last week. She asked for Pop-Tarts once, but Jane seemed unduly annoyed by her request, so she hasn’t asked for anything since.

When she finishes, Jane sets the tray aside so Darcy has space to work. She opens the laptop and it flickers to life. Feeling excited at the upcoming break from mind-blending boredom, Darcy opens a web browser. When she tries to open her Stark Industries’ email account, however, she finds she can't get past the SI home page.

“Jane?”

She looks up from her book. “Yes?”

“I can’t get into my emails. It says I’m not allowed to access the internal site.”

“Oh, you’re not allowed to work, Darcy! Strict orders from Pepper Potts.” Jane lets out a tinkly little laugh. “You can work on your little hacking projects. You love those. Why don’t you keep working on the Artamonov account?”

She hadn’t told anyone about her plans to hack that particular businessman’s bank records. She suspects he's working with Hydra and the Hand.

“Jane, how -”

“Work on Artamonov, Darcy.” Jane interrupts. Her voice is cold.

“Okay.” Darcy wonders if her friends blame her for the attack. _That's some victim blaming bullshit..._

Out of the corner of her eyes, Darcy watches Jane watch her laptop screen. Today, Jane is wearing a pretty, plum colored v-neck top. She is dressing much nicer these days, in fitted t-shirts and jeans she didn't buy five years ago. She hasn't worn her “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you” t-shirt even once this week and that is basically second skin to her. She referred to Pepper by her full name.

Darcy has a sudden, terrifying thought.

_This is not her Jane._


	7. Ciphertext

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is mostly exposition, which I know isn't the most exciting thing...  
> (Don’t ask my why Darcy couldn’t just hack into her SI email, lol.)

Darcy builds her case against Fake Jane slowly. If there’s anything she learned from Jane - her lovely, perfect, awesome, _real_ Jane - besides the application of magnetohydrodynamics, is that hypotheses are useless without facts and data. So, she collects both. This Jane’s mannerisms are different, more abrupt. While her Jane was never one for idle chitchat, she was never short with Darcy, never told her to be quiet and do her work. This Jane is vexed by more or less every conversation Darcy tries to initiate. She’s afraid she’ll lose her voice from lack of use.

She’s never left alone with the laptop. Fake Jane is always sitting beside her with a clear view of the laptop screen, so she can’t sneakily contact anyone. Not that she could anyway since she’s locked out of every method of communication - email accounts, Facebook, fucking Tinder, among others - ostensibly for security reasons until they find whoever kidnapped her and why, according to Fake Jane. Anything but her Stark Industries email would be useless anyway; Coulson made her delete all social media profiles _and_ her Google accounts as soon as he knew that she had figured out he was alive. The man is so paranoid. Rightly so, but still. He could have let her keep her YouTube account; she had so many videos on her ‘Watch Later’ playlist.

That’s the least of her worries. Fake Jane seems to be really invested in her Artamonov project, so it’s clear to Darcy that that is the reason for her imprisonment. She has always imagined any threats to her life would manifest because she’s easier to get to than Jane is (no royal, godly boyfriend) or because she’s easy bait for the Avengers. It thrills her that she was kidnapped on her own merit. The appropriate response to that is horror, she knows, but her paradigm has shifted dramatically since Thor and the Avengers brought aliens and espionage into her life. This is practically par for the course.

Darcy is glad the Bad Guys, as she has termed them, are putting up this frankly unnecessary charade. Some memories are coming back to her; she did _not_ enjoy the full hour of relentless beating she had to endure in the cell before she revealed her intentions for Artamonov. Although, she managed to convince them she knew nothing about Stark Industries’ armory holdings. So, she would like to keep them thinking that she’s recovering and believing their lies. Her collarbone hurts sometimes as do her ribs, but her leg never does, so she suspects it isn’t actually broken and the cast is just a way to keep her in bed. _Smart_.

She realizes she’s being drugged on her tenth day in the fake hospital room. Whatever they’re giving her through the IV is not saline to keep her hydrated as Fake Jane says, and it definitely is not morphine. They give her opioids with her meals to control the pain - she recognizes Percocet - but whenever she flags in her work on Artamonov, she notices that her IV drip ratchets up on its own as if someone is controlling it remotely. She’s asleep in less than a minute every time. She wakes up to new aches and bruises every day.

It’s really giving her a complex about her bodily autonomy.

Darcy constructs an escape plan. She’s realistic enough to know that she can’t break out on her own; she doesn’t know who has her or where, or if she’s even in New York. She has no hope of besting these people physically. Her best bet is to notify someone. She racks her brain for three days straight for alternative forms of communication and comes up with the only thing she can feasibly do: infiltrate Stark’s bank accounts and hope he notices. She can make it easy for him or any mildly competent IT guy at Goldman Sachs to trace her work to her location. She can fool Fake Jane into thinking she’s still trying to hack into one of Artamonov’s many shell corporations. She’s been careful to give Fake Jane steady information about his money and communications; she doesn’t care if he’s endangered by her work because he’s a terrible human being whose charity for political refugees is actually a tax shelter for his Hand money.

Except, hacking into Tony Stark’s personal bank accounts is harder than hacking into the accounts of the Hand’s evil Daddy Warbucks. Natch. So she switches tactics. In the interest of transparency, Pepper is very strict with the money Stark Industries allocates for the Stark Relief Foundation. Most of that goes to relief and renovation projects in areas that have seen Avengers-related damage. Pepper would notice immediately if anything went missing.

One bright morning - as far as Darcy can tell from the fake window in her room - she transfers most of the money in the Stark Relief Foundation account to her own bank account, leaving her with $56,057,000 and Stark Relief with nothing but $10,000 and a sweet little encrypted note. The numbers, temporary as they are, look beautiful on her statement.

She waits.

-//-

Steve watches as Jane abruptly ends an angry conversation with Coulson about his investigations into Darcy’s disappearance. Her anger continues to rise every day as Steve falls deeper and deeper into despair. As she roughly throws her phone on the couch and picks up her laptop to continue searching any area accessible by satellite, Steve begrudgingly admits to himself that Tony is right. They have no leads.

Tony’s search of Darcy’s tablet yielded nothing unusual except a video she had saved of two professional men performing explicit, sexual acts. Apparently, women watch blue films now. Tony said he looks forward to Darcy coming home so he can tease her about it.

They are all perplexed about the reason for Darcy’s disappearance. No one has contacted them to ask for a ransom or anything in return for her safety. And as satisfying as it would be to beat into submission someone like Rumlow, there is no evidence that Hydra is involved.

So, Steve lifts the hold on missions and takes most of them on his own. It doesn’t help.

He’s running a pick-up mission in Germany with Natasha one day when Maria tells them to return as quickly as possible. They barely say goodbye to Chancellor Merkel before getting on the jet home. Jane is waiting for them as soon as they disembark.

“We found - we _think_ we found her,” Jane says breathlessly.

Steve, covered in two days’ worth of grime and more than a little bit of blood, gets back on the Quinjet. On the video chat, Pepper explains the situation for Steve and Natasha’s benefit.

“She stole $56 million from the Avengers.”

Natasha doesn’t even blink. “How?”

“We’re still working that out. The bank called me in a panic this afternoon to tell me that the Relief Foundation account has been cleaned out almost entirely and deposited to the savings account of Darcy Katherine Lewis. Tony traced the origin of the transaction in basically 5 minutes; the jet’s locked onto those coordinates now. Jarvis is de-encrypting the rest.”

Steve frowns, “She would need to have Internet access for this?”

Pepper nods her confirmation.

“Yes. Why not just contact us?” Natasha asks.

Thor, who has been stewing murderously in his seat, says, “We believe she is under duress.” He looks like he’s ready for blood. It can be easy to forget, given Thor’s friendly and buoyant nature, that he’s a warrior and a prince and a god to boot. His demeanor now, however, leaves it to no question. There is an air of dangerous electric energy around him that even Steve would find difficult to approach.

Thunder rumbles in the distance.

Tony turns around in the co-pilot’s seat and joins the conversation. “You’re all going to eat your words soon. Darcy is not _under duress_. If she was, the money would have gone to some nameless account, not to her own. It was way too easy for me trace her work. She knows how to hide herself on the net; she’s been doing it for 10 months now. And why only steal from the Relief Foundation, which has - not to brag - way less money than our,” he points to Pepper, “personal accounts? Why steal from _Pepper fucking Potts_?”

Pepper rolls her eyes at that and signs off from the chat.

“Pepper keeps up…” Natasha says slowly. “So, she stole the money to get Pepper's attention and made it easy for you to find her.”

Tony hums happily. He nods at Steve, “She’s clever, your girl.”

Steve is about to respond when the jet jerks sharply to the left as Clint swerves to avoid a strike of lightning. Clint grumbles under his breath, but does not reproach Thor.

Above them, Jarvis projects its findings onto the screen descending from the jet’s ceiling. It's an encrypted note: _From Russia, with love_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is fairly short, but I couldn't find a better place to end this chapter without chopping up the next one.


	8. Badassery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I borrowed two of Darcy’s lines from the movie 'Mr. Right'. Fanfic writers generally don't have to do this anymore, so call this a holdover from my earlier fanfic years: no copyright infringement intended.

The jig is up and Darcy can’t even blame anyone else. She would like to, but in the end, she gave herself away. She got annoyed, that’s all. When she woke up from yet _another_ drug-induced nap to fresh bruises and Fake Jane’s ill-disguised, casual probing about Stark Industries’ nuclear energy apparatus, she snapped.

“Why don’t you just tell me what you want, man? I’m not cut out for all this acting; I took, like, one theater course in high school for a fine arts credit.”

Fake Jane, who was peering at the numbers on the laptop screen with a frown on her face, sits up. “I don’t know what you mean. Are you feeling okay? Is it the pain?” She reaches for the dial of the IV drip.

“Don’t you dare, bitch,” Darcy growls. Before Fake Jane can get up from her seat, Darcy rips off the tape on the back of her hand and slides out the IV needle. A drop of blood slowly drips down her wrist. She makes to sit up, but Fake Jane pushes her back into bed.

“We thought giving you a little work would help you be less bored while you recover, but you’ve been working too hard. You need a rest; let’s watch -”

Darcy slaps her hands away from her shoulders. “No. I’m over this.” Her patience has been running thin ever since she sent off her SOS to the Avengers a few hours ago. She pushes the console and the laptop on it violently away from her. It rolls to a stop at the foot of her bed, crashing against the plastic footboard. She jerks her leg out of the elevated sling and sits up on the bed.

The surprise on Fake Jane’s face is quickly replaced with cold, restrained anger. She looks at Darcy calculatingly. “You know, we didn’t want to hurt you. We wanted to do this the easy way.”

Darcy scoffs loudly, “You kidnapped me, beat me, lied to me, kept me drugged and injured for, what, three weeks now? That’s the easy way, is it?”

“We have much… _stronger_ methods of persuasion. I convinced everyone this would be better.”

Darcy is feeling much braver than someone in her current position should. “Forgive me if I don’t prostrate myself at your feet in gratitude.”

Fake Jane smiles patiently. “You can either continue to trace the 11 shell corporations back to Artamonov’s clients, or we can have a little chat about your friend Stark’s plans for the future. Your choice.” Her voice is calm and meant to be soothing.

 _What would Natasha do?_ Darcy thinks.

Her adoptive parents were doting and she never learned to keep her mouth shut when it’s good for her, so she responds with an equally calm, “Fuck you.”

_Probably not that._

Fake Jane regards her silently for a moment, head tilted to one side. “That was not an option.”

-//-

Darcy comes to in the middle of a dimly lit, stone hallway. It takes her a moment, but through the pounding headache and dusty darkness, she’s able to make out two goons holding her up. There’s another in front leading the way with a flashlight. She doesn’t know where she’s being dragged off to, but there sure as shit won’t be pillows and oatmeal in there. _God_ , she hopes it’s not the cell. It’s probably still splattered in her blood and she’s pretty sure she heard rats in there.

Her collarbone and ribs hurt as does, like, every other part of her body, but the fake cast on her leg is gone. It’s a small comfort now that she’s being yanked down this gross, dusty hallway with her hands tied with rope in front of her. Besides the identical security cameras on every hallway, there are no points of interest she can keep track of that will help her navigate should she be able to free herself; all the rooms are closed and the hallways are devoid of furniture or wall hangings. She can’t see more than a few feet in front of her anyway.

Their little party comes to a sudden stop before a blank stretch of wall approximately the size of a regular door. It’s the end of a hallway with no other turns. The goon with the flashlight slides his hand up the wall and presses it into the very left corner. The wall slowly swings open to reveal a small room, similar to the cell. It has a bed with a metal frame and no mattress. Darcy struggles when they try to shove her inside and makes sure to scrape her elbow firmly against the wall, leaving a small streak of blood. Predictably, she loses the fight and falls into the room on her hands and knees, scraping them both in process.

“ _Motherfucker_!” she gasps in pain. “Take it easy, asshole.” Pinpricks of blood from her knees seep through the thin hospital gown she was given by the Fake Jane in the fake hospital room. She really should have made more of an effort to stay there. She misses Netflix.

The guy with the flashlight answers her glare with a disdainful look and says imperiously to the other two goons, “Watch her.” He leaves in a huff.

The sound of stone on stone as the wall swings shut behind him makes Darcy shiver. She wonders how anyone will find her here.

“Self-important, isn’t he? Thinks highly of himself?” Darcy teases the goons as they pick her up and set her on the bed frame. The metal slats across the frame wobble as she settles. They’re not screwed down.

“I can tell he’s not the big boss though,” Darcy continues. “None of you are. I have to say, I feel a little insulted your boss didn’t come see me in person. I suppose I must be content with Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.”

“Shut _up_ , bitch.”

Darcy knows the slap is coming before the guard even turns to her. Her head snaps to the side when he makes impact and a hot trickle rolls down the back of her neck, making her shudder. Her nose is bleeding. She slowly faces front again and forces herself to roll her eyes instead of bursting into tears.

“Men,” she whispers conspiratorially to the other guy. “Such fragile egos, amiright?”

She gets another backhanded slap for that. This time, it’s from Tweedle-dum and it’s all knuckles. Her healing collarbone rattles in its cast and she fights not to black out from the pain. The sirens going off in her head help a little.

Except, they’re not in her head because her captors can hear them too. They’re panicking, but trying not to look like it. She can think of no other reason for an alarm like this besides an infiltration or an attack. The guards seem to listen intently to the walkie talkies clipped to their chests before whispering amongst themselves. She thinks she hears the words ‘rescue’ and ‘Avengers’.

Darcy could sing with happiness.

“Looks like my friends are here, huh?” Her captors turn to her, failing to hide their panic.

Tweedle-dum, Russian accent heavy on his tongue, tells her, “Don’t get your hopes up, little girl. They won’t find you here.”

She laughs. “Can I be honest here?”

Tweedle-dee chuckles at her and sits on the bed next to her. “Sure, baby.”

Darcy trembles at his sudden proximity but doesn’t shrink away from his looming presence. She shakes her hair out of her face. “I don’t understand your plan. Hide me in this stone shoebox and wait for the Avengers to come kill you like sitting ducks?”

Their jaws twitch in unison. She is walking into very dangerous territory, but she never could help herself.

“Is it a ‘get killed’ plan? Like, a plan to _get killed_? An elaborate suicide pact? That’s really romantic; it’s so progressive of you two to be in love in the current political climate - a real life, gay Romeo and Juliet -”

This slap knocks her head into the metal headboard behind her and she passes out.

-//-

When she’s next conscious, only Tweedle-dum is in the room. He’s fiddling with his gun and staring broodily at her from across the room.

Darcy eyes the gun warily. “What’s the sitch, man? How many of your little pals are dead so far?”

Tweedle-dum scoffs and looks away. His walkie talkie crackles to life and he turns away from her to yell urgently into it. He’s speaking Russian, so Darcy doesn’t know what he’s saying, but he’s being loud and that’s enough for her. _Now or never, Lewis._

She quietly slides off the bed. She picks up one of the loose metal slats from the bed frame and shakily crosses the room in two steps, swings hard, and hits him solidly over the head with the metal pole. He turns to her in surprise, arms outstretched, but she hits him again and he goes down. He’s groaning on the floor and fumbling for the gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans. She hits him on the head two more times, then again when he stirs. This time, he stays still.

Darcy watches the blood splatter on her gown for a moment, fascinated. Then drops the pole with a clatter and retches hard until she vomits. Wiping her mouth on a bloodless area of her gown, she walks on unsteady legs to the patch of wall she knows is the door. She spends precious minutes pressing on every part of the wall, but it remains stubbornly shut. Blinking back tears of frustration, she goes back to the guard and gingerly fishes out the gun from his waistband. Clutching it tightly in her bound hands, she curls into the farthest corner of the room and finally lets herself cry.

-//-

The Quinjet silently touches down on a clear area behind a forest, staying hidden. Tony looks out through the windshield into the weak sunlight and rolling fog. Through the gaps in the trees, he can make out a crumbling, four story building flanked by two smokestacks in the horizon.

He puts Jarvis in charge of the Quinjet and suits up with the rest of them. Everyone is uncharacteristically quiet. The whole flight was like that and it unnerves him. He clears his throat, tells Jarvis to bring up the specs for the building.

Steve steps forward and repeats the plan. “We sweep every floor. Nat, you take the ground floor. Clint, take the second; Tony, third; I’ll take the fourth. Thor, perimeter. Bruce… be ready for code green.”

They all nod, mouths set in grim lines, and head out.

-//-

Darcy considers sleeping. She’s exhausted from two weeks of trying to remain on high alert despite the cocktail of drugs the bad guys continuously pumped into her system. Her entire body hurts. Her _face_ hurts. She’s the kind of bone-deep tired she hasn’t felt since Malekith at Greenwich. That sounds so outrageous she hiccups out a soft giggle. _What the fuck is her life._

She stays awake.

Good thing too because six minutes and fourteen seconds later, if she counted her Mississippis right, she hears Tony Stark behind the wall.

“Third floor clear,” she hears him say, presumably into the comms.

Darcy is frozen for a second before she scrambles up to the wall. Hoping against hope that Tony hears her, she yells, “Third floor _not_ clear! Third floor _very not clear_! Tony!”

-//-

Tony once took Pepper to the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Eve concert - skipping hundreds of people on the eleven-year waiting list - and the music was exquisite.

Darcy’s voice, muffled as it is from behind the wall, sounds even better.


	9. Heroics

Jarvis outlines two figures in the hidden room, someone of Darcy’s height and figure right against the wall and a larger body slumped on the floor in the back. Tony tells Darcy to stand to her right side as far back as she can. When she confirms her position, he blasts the wall open from her opposite side. Before he can even scan the room, he has an armful of Darcy.

“ _Tony_ , thank god. I thought maybe you were - I am _so_ glad to see you.” She clings to him as she talks, arms crushed tight against his suit’s torso.

He flips his mask open, cups his hand carefully around her head, and pulls back to look at her face. There’s a nasty bruise on her forehead, she has a split lip, and there’s a makeshift cast across her shoulder. On the whole, she seems unharmed - no lasting damage of the physical kind. Tony knows from personal experience, and the tear tracks on her face, that that means nothing.

“Me too, kid. You have no idea.”

He gently sets her an arm’s length away, so he can step out of the suit before pulling her back into his arms. She practically climbs into his lap and presses her face into his chest, right over his heart. He’s so close to her, it’s almost surreal.

“Guys. I’ve got her. I’ve got her,” he says urgently into his earpiece. The team is quiet, but Clint whoops in victory.

“Get her back to the jet, ASAP. The rest of us will finish up,” Steve says. His voice is carefully neutral.

Darcy is mumbling something into his chest. Tony tilts her face up to hear her better.

“Untie me. Untie me.” She holds her wrists up to him.

A blinding bolt of rage flashes through him at the sight of the rope wound around her wrists. He breathes in deeply and assesses her condition. The rope is too tangled to unknot and too tightly tied for him to rip it without hurting her. Iron Man is equipped with lasers and bombs, but not shears.

“I don't have anything to cut that with right now, Darcy,” he says apologetically, “but I will as soon as we get back to the jet.”

“ _Fuck_. Fine.” She takes a step back, resigned and teary.

She seems a little manic and a lot scared, so Tony takes the time to explain. “I’m going to knock down this wall and fly you out, okay? Jet’s about 5 miles away; we’ll be there in a sec.” He gets back in the suit, makes sure she’s pressed tight behind him as he trains the particle beams on his hands at the outside wall. He fires two short rounds and the wall crumbles. He makes to step forward, but she’s calling his name again.

“Tony. Tony.” She pulls on his arm frantically until he turns. “I think I killed someone.”  
  
He looks down at her, careful to hide the shock he feels. His eyes flick to the man crumpled on the floor across the small room. He smiles.

“That's so badass, Lewis.”

-//-

Darcy has flown with Tony only once before, under circumstances much nicer than the one they’re in now. It’s still as exhilarating as it was the first time. The smell of fresh air after a month stuck inside what turns out to be an old, abandoned factory is really doing it for her. She’s in the jet in a flash. Bruce is in front of her with industrial strength scissors and a first aid kit before she can situate herself properly on the seat Tony deposited her on. When the rope falls from her wrists, she kicks it as far away from her as she can. Tony watches it slide until it hits a box of tools across the aisle.

Bruce sits next to her and inspects her wrists. They’re rubbed raw and bleeding much like her knees and elbows. She can tell that he has no idea where to start.

“Where are you hurt?” He asks.

“Dude, where am I _not_ hurt.” She points to her collarbone, “Broken, but that’s the worst of it. Well, besides whatever PTSD eventually comes from this shit.”

From the pilot’s seat, Tony grins understandingly. “I can refer you to a great therapist.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Name’s Johnnie Walker.”

Darcy can’t help but laugh. “Ugh, you’re right. I could use a drink.”

He gets up and opens a hidden compartment in his locker. He’s about to hand her a glass of scotch when the jet opens and the rest of the team trudges in. They’re covered in soot but no one seems injured, which is unsurprising. The guards Darcy’s captors employed were not competent in the slightest - nothing but brute strength.

“Don’t give her that.” Steve pushes Tony’s arm away. Tony rolls his eyes and hands the drink to Natasha who hands it to Darcy.

Steve glares at Natasha, then asks Darcy, “When was the last time you ate?”

She shrugs.

He kneels in front of her. His eyes roam over her body, no doubt noting her various injuries. Darcy is suddenly reminded that she is braless in a thin, bloody hospital gown. He looks up at her, naked reverence on his face. She doesn’t know what to do with that, so she reaches out and pushes an errant lock of hair back from his forehead.

“Don’t be a spoilsport, Rogers.” She downs the two fingers of scotch in one.

Clint fires up the jet. Steve buckles the seat belt around her waist.

Thor’s patience finally breaks. He sits next to her and reaches out to touch her neck. When she nods, he touches the cast on her collarbone with his thumb. She hisses at the jolt of pain and he looks back up at her, fury in his eyes. He opens his mouth to speak.

She puts up a hand to stop him. “Do _not_ overreact. I've had worse.”

“ _What?_ ” Clint shrieks at the same time as Thor asks heatedly, “Who has hurt you so?”

Darcy quickly backtracks. “Wait, no. I just said that because you guys say it all the time. I actually haven't had worse. But still, don’t overreact.”

“‘ _Don’t overre_ ’-” Steve stands at her side, nearly vibrating with anger. “Shit, Darcy, they had you for a _month_. This is us _under_ reacting.”

She leans her head back against the head rest and closes her eyes. “Don't swear, Steve; it's not Christian.”

Bruce lets out a strangled laugh.

Steve crosses his arms over his chest. “Why didn’t you let us know you were okay in that computer note?”

“‘ _Computer note_ ’...” Darcy snorts, closing her eyes again. “I _did_ let you know I was okay. I said, ‘ _I’m fine. SOS_ ’.”

“You did not.”

She sighs, “It was in Morse Code. I was betting the idiots wouldn’t understand it if they looked at the laptop I was using. I didn't want to get in trouble.”

“You know Morse Code?” Clint asks, surprised.

She waves her hand dismissively. “Who doesn’t know Morse Code?”

Bruce mutters, “Me...”

Tony turns to her thoughtfully. “Jarvis wasn’t looking for it. I thought the backslashes were HTML errors.”

She says, tone flat, “Wow, you guys really suck at this.”

“You wrote out ‘ _From Russia, with love_ ’, but put the actual message in code?” Natasha sounds proud.

Steve turns to her expectantly, still frowning.

Darcy waits a beat. “I wanted to be dramatic?”

Bruce groans, “You have got to be kidding me, Lewis.”

-//-

It’s a long 11 hours back to New York.

Natasha takes her aside first, away from the others’ eyes. Together, they go over her injuries, meticulously cleaning out the grit and debris. She gives her a pair of sweatpants, a large t-shirt to wear, and a hair tie to hold her greasy hair back from her face. Clint gives her a power bar and a Big Mac. Darcy is not allowed to sleep because Bruce believes she has a concussion; that explains the constant headache. Everyone takes turns keeping her company. She’s curled on the seat with her arms tucked inside her shirt sleeves when Steve sits next to her. She shuffles sideways until she’s pressed against his side. He puts his arm around her, pulling her closer, and drops a soft kiss on her head.

She presses her face against the collar of his undershirt. “You smell, Rogers.”

Steve laughs quietly. “Apologies, ma’am.”

Darcy slides one arm out of her sleeve and rests her hand against his collarbone. His skin is pleasantly warm under her fingers.

“Do you mind if I cry?” She mumbles against his neck.

“No, sweetheart.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another short one because I have mini writer's block.


	10. Reason

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mostly on a whim, I retroactively titled every chapter.

“Be reasonable,” Bruce sighs, exasperated.

“Stating my preference is reasonable.”

“Your preference is unreasonable,” Clint responds.

Darcy grinds her teeth in annoyance. “My injuries are not extensive enough -”

“Bruised ribs, broken collar bone - badly set, concussion, infected cut on your back. You fainted twice on the way here and you’re barely upright now,” Helen counters.

Darcy turns to her as much as she can without wincing. Her ribs ache in protest. The Percocet wore off hours ago, and she’s holding back pained screams by the skin of her teeth. “You are the world’s foremost medical doctor -”

“Genetics,” Helen interrupts.

“Whatever. Human body. Bruce has treated fucking cholera.”

“Re-setting a broken bone is not quite the same,” he corrects her gently.

“Darce, we all go to the hospital,” Natasha says softly. “There’s no shame in it.”

“You guys are the most melodramatic, egotistical people I have ever met.” Darcy rolls her eyes. “‘ _No shame in it_ ’,” she mutters mockingly. “I’m not ashamed of going to the hospital; I just don’t want to.”

Jane looks at her imploringly. Darcy shakes her head. No one but Jane needs to know about the fake hospital room. Everyone will know soon enough when Maria receives NATO’s findings.

“Darcy, this is quite absurd. Healers will only accelerate your recovery,” Thor says.

“Your _face_ is quite absurd,” she grumbles under her breath. “I’m not going,” she says loudly.

“Glad that’s settled.” Tony jumps down from the table across from the examination bed and slides his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll call my physician; she’ll see her here.”

Darcy tries to smile gratefully at Tony, but her collarbone gives a painful lurch and it comes out as more of a grimace.

“No. She is going to the hospital.” Steve, who has been silent through this whole discussion, finally speaks. He carried her in from the Quinjet when she was half delirious from pain and barely conscious. She doesn’t remember much; she woke up on the exam table in Helen’s lab, hooked up to an IV. The morphine and the 27 butterfly bandages on her body are all that’s holding her together. Still.

“I am _not_.”

“You are, and that’s final.” His tone brokers no argument. He is Captain America, not Steve.

She looks at the others beseechingly and finds no support there; even Tony isn’t meeting her eyes. She wipes away angry tears. “Fine, _Captain Rogers_.”

-//-

Roughly forty-five minutes later, courtesy of the helicopter she didn’t know Tony owned, Darcy is on yet another hospital bed; this time, in New York Presbyterian. She focuses on the weight of Jane’s hand in hers to stop herself from losing it completely. Jane is wearing a blue flannel shirt over a t-shirt with a cartoon tree. Darcy is wearing shorts and one of Jane’s flannel button ups for ease of treatment. She has worn this shirt plenty of times; it’s practically hers. _Jane is real._

Once she is settled upright on the bed, Jane turns to her. “I have to go fill out some forms as your emergency contact - ten minutes, tops.”

Darcy nods, “Yeah, sure. Thanks.”

Jane squeezes her fingers reassuringly. “The others are just outside. I’ll leave the door open.”

Tony had requested a private room before she could assert her preference for a public bed in the ER. So she’s in a cozy little room with a great view of the Hudson River. The small TV above her bed is playing the news, which is showing the location, date, and time in one corner of the screen quite clearly. It matches the time and date displayed on the phone Tony gave her earlier. There’s an outline of Avengers Tower in the generic painting of the New York skyline on the wall across from her. There’s a door leading to what she assumes is the bathroom. She can hear quite clearly the hustle and bustle of nurses outside her door. Darcy collects this and a hundred other small observations about the room to stave off slipping back into the nightmare that was her month in the fake hospital room. It mostly works.

Jane has been gone a minute when the door squeaks open wider. In the dim light, Darcy sees a dark figure walk into the room, silhouetted against the bright light of the hallway. The hip to shoulder ratio tells her it’s Steve, but her traitorous brain supplies her with images of the dark-haired man at the factory who hit her repeatedly until she spat up blood and sobbed. She fumbles for the lamp on the bedside table with shaking hands. Steve hurries in to steady it so she can flick on the light. Seeing his face does nothing to calm her rapidly beating heart; she can feel herself teetering on the verge of hyperventilation.

Steve slips into Distressed Civilian mode. He’s careful not to touch her without her permission, resting his hands near her on the bed instead. From the chair next to the bed, he reassures her softly, “Hey, hey, Darce. It’s me, Steve, all right? Just me.”

She meets his eyes and nods quickly, tries to regulate her breathing. It doesn’t work and she panics even more.

“Darcy, sweetheart, can you breathe with me? In and out, real slow.”

She squeezes her eyes tight and breathes as instructed. She latches onto him, concentrating on the way his calloused palm rubs against the back of her hand. Her whole hand fits in his, even when she curls her fingers around just his thumb. There are scabs on his knuckles. She never did ask what exactly happened in the factory.

He keeps up a steady stream of reassurances. She has no idea what he’s saying, but the sound of his voice wraps her in comfort and her panic slowly subsides. By the end, she’s left exhausted and drenched in sweat. She settles back into the pillows and closes her eyes to stop the embarrassed tears from slipping out.

He nudges her other hand with something cool and she opens his eyes to find a glass of water in front of her. “Have a sip.”

She takes it gratefully, “Thanks.”

The door opens again and Darcy breathes in sharply, tightening her grip on Steve’s hand. It turns out to be her doctor, followed by Jane.

Dr. Nakatomi stops short when she sees Steve, then shakes off her surprise. “Okay, Miss Lewis. We’ve looked at your x-rays and blood work. You’ve done quite a number on, well, everything. I’ll thank you to stay out of such activities from now on,” she says mock sternly.

Darcy laughs weakly. “Oh, I plan to, Doctor. No more heroics for me.”

“Good. We’re going to re-set your collarbone and wrap your ribs to stop them from fracturing. You’ll need to be under general anesthesia for most of that and the stitching up. If that’s okay with you, I have some forms for you to sign.” She hands Darcy a clipboard.

Darcy looks to Jane, who nods at her. She takes that to mean that Jane has read the forms, so she scribbles her initials on the highlighted lines, too tired for her regular signature. She slips her hand back into Steve's.

The doctor flips through the forms, looking satisfied. “Do you have any questions or concerns?”

Darcy shakes her head and regrets it immediately. She can practically feel her brain rattling around in there.

“Okay. I’ll be back to prep you in ten minutes. See if you think of any questions in the meantime.” She turns to Jane, “Dr. Foster, a word?”

Jane, looking surprised, follows her out.

Steve turns to Darcy and hands her the glass of water again. “Have some more. You’re dehydrated.”

Darcy rolls her eyes, but finishes the rest of the glass anyway.

He smiles at her and takes the glass back. “Good girl.”

The patronizing praise reminds her of her anger. She jerks her hand out of his. “Don’t call me that,” she snaps, followed by, “You don’t have to stay.”

His smile falters. “I want to stay.”

“Jane will be back any minute.”

“I know,” he says slowly. “I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“I’m fine now, thanks. You can go.” She picks up the TV remote and starts looking through the guide.

Out of the corner of her eyes, she sees Steve closing his eyes as if to steel himself before saying, “I know you’re angry that I made you come to the hospital, but -”

She scrolls through the TV guide, not really reading the title of the shows, “I’m not angry, Captain. Just following orders.”

He sighs. “It wasn’t an order.”

“Sure sounded like one, Cap.”

“You needed to be treated -”

“And I am,” Darcy smiles blandly at him. “Gonna be knocked out and everything.”

His jaw twitches. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

“I’m sure you have more important things to do.”

“I assure you, I do not.”

-//-

True to his word, Steve is there when she wakes up from the anesthesia. He’s still reading _The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam_. He usually finishes a book in a few days, but she supposes he didn’t do much leisure reading while she was held captive in a random mining ghost town in Russia.

She watches him read for a minute. His golden hair shines like it does right after he showers. The stubble on his cheek is gone, which is - unpopular opinion - a shame. There’s a towel hanging over his chair. He’s changed out of his dirty under armor into an indecently tight blue t-shirt and khakis. She’s told him many times that men his age don’t wear khakis anymore, but he likes his old man wardrobe. He wore corduroy pants the last time New York had snow. It hugged his ass in a way Darcy definitely did _not_ appreciate.

He touches his index finger to his tongue, then flips a page.

She has no words for how comforting that small, familiar gesture is.

“You are such a cliché,” she rasps. Her throat is as dry as New Mexico in the summer.

His head snaps up. “Darcy!” He sets down the book hastily and holds up a glass of water to her face. This one has a krazy straw. She sips noisily.

“This is such a cliché, oh my god,” Darcy groans as she lays back against the pillows. “How long have I been out? Where's Jane?” she demands.

Steve looks hurt.

“Oh, don’t be like that. I’m glad you’re here too.”

His face brightens immediately. “Thor's making Jane eat dinner. How do you feel?”

“Ache-y. My head is throbbing. How long have I been out?” she asks again.

“A few hours now. They’ll want your vitals. I’m going to call for a nurse, okay?”

“Can you open the curtains first?” It's imperative she be sure of her location.

He pulls back the vertical blinds. She strains to look out into the city, so he gently props her up with a hand at her back. It’s past sunset, but if she squints, she can make out the Avengers’ A glowing in the distance - a speck of blue against the dark night. She checks her phone: _9:23 PM, New York City_.

“You _are_ Steve, right?” Darcy asks quietly, voice wavering.

Steve looks at her strangely. “Who else would I be? Are you feeling okay?” He touches her forehead with light fingers, barely brushing her hair. She holds herself still so she doesn't flinch.

She shrugs. It makes her shoulders twinge in pain. Given how drowsy she feels, she knows the pain medication or morphine or whatever they have her on is making her loopy. Maybe that’s why she’s not angry anymore.

“Dunno. Could be a crazy person.”

He goes for humor in the face of her small, sad voice. “That sounds like Tony and I sure as shit ain’t him, sweetheart.” He sits down next to her again and presses the call button for the nurse.

She laughs weakly. “You kiss your mother with that mouth, Rogers?”

He looks down at her bedsheets. “Hopin’ to kiss you actually,” he mumbles, smoothing out imaginary wrinkles.

She's watching his fingers, so she misses what he says. “What?”

He looks up at her and says, his voice flat, “My mother’s dead, Darcy.”

She is immediately horrified. “Of - of course. I'm sorry; that was incon -”

There’s a twinkle in his eye, the one he gets when he’s being a sarcastic little shit. One side of his full, pink mouth is pulled up in a smirk.

It strains her dry throat, but she says indignantly, “You’re teasing me!”

Steve sobers immediately, all trace of mischief erased from his face. “I would never tease a pretty dame.” He gives her another glass of water.

Darcy grins. “You think I’m pretty?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The response to this fic has far surpassed my expectations. It's been amazing and I want to thank everyone for commenting, liking, and reading. I really appreciate it and hope you continue to enjoy this xxxx


	11. Chlorophyll

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Google says the word ‘cute’ didn’t enter the popular vernacular until the 1950s.

From behind the glass, Steve watches a thin stream of blood run slowly down Darcy’s temple as she shakes and shudders against the far corner. The man punches her again, sending her sprawling across the room. He pulls her up by her hair to scream questions at her but she’s unresponsive, probably unconscious again. Steve can’t get to her, confined as he is in the adjacent room. He tried to punch his way through the wall and got nothing but bleeding knuckles for his efforts. Still. He’s gearing up for another punch when the barrier between them vanishes. The momentum has him stumbling into the room. He gasps in surprise.

And jerks awake in the armchair of an overly warm hospital room. The serum keeps him running hot, and the artificial heat of the room combined with these tortured dreams Steve cannot conquer leaves him parched and clammy with sweat. He looks to his left.

Darcy is fast asleep on the bed beside him. Her heartbeat is steady. She’s not tossing and turning like she does most nights; he hopes she will wake in the morning without pale cheeks and the ever-present haunted look in her eyes. He knows now why she hates the hospital; loathe as they all are to keep her someplace she doesn’t want to be, she is still recovering from malnourishment, dehydration, and a whole host of other injuries. But she is improving everyday; a few days ago, she insisted Jane go back to the Tower at night after they spent all day together, tinkering with handheld astronomy equipment that he has no hope of understanding.

Jane goes home, but Steve can’t bring himself to leave Darcy alone at night. He’s plagued by thoughts of assailants disguised as medical staff. He doesn’t need much sleep, so he sits vigil outside her room for two nights, enduring the nurses’ fond looks and cheeky grins. She calls him in on the third night, rolling her eyes and telling him he isn’t as subtle as he thinks he is. Now, he spends every other night with her - a concession she made when he asked her to let him stay - allegedly sleeping but really reliving the horror of visiting the old factory again and seeing for himself the dingy little room where she was imprisoned for a month.

His guilt is always forefront in his mind. Tony tells him it’s not anyone’s fault, which sets him on edge because Tony’s garish penchant for soundproof rooms and brittle glass walls is what put her in danger in the first place. It’s not a fair thought, Steve knows. Tony takes responsibility for every casualty, for every mission gone awry. He doesn’t let it show, but there are glimpses - clues in what he says and how he says it - that reveal the crippling guilt Tony feels sometimes. It doesn’t make sense, but none of them - maladjusted group of misfits that they are - talk about it.

The mechanically impenetrable Tower has made them all overconfident, less vigilant because it feels like _home_.

He won’t make that mistake again.

-//-

“Drink this.”

Darcy takes the bright green drink in hand, crinkling her nose in distaste at the color. Steve finds it devastatingly cute - an adjective he learned from Natasha, who frequently uses it to refer to Sam when he can’t hear.

“You are unhealthily obsessed with my hydration levels, man.” She takes a sip and shudders. “That is _vile_. What is this?”

“Chlorophyll. Tony says it’s good for -”

“Tony can go fuck himself, Steve.” She thrusts the drink back into his hands. “I'm not drinking this… this… _vegetable jizz_ he forces on you after missions.”

He doesn’t even flinch internally at her casual references to semen anymore.

“Tony put it in a Mason jar for you. He even put a hole in the top for your krazy straw.”

“Ugh.”

-//-

Darcy is discharged from the hospital on Monday and back at work by Wednesday, a development with which Steve is supremely unsatisfied. She sets him straight though. It is not his decision, never was, and his patronizing treatment of her won’t fly anymore. He acquiesces, but not before treating everyone to a show of masculine frustration by clenching his jaw, hands on his hips. She just rolls her eyes and walks away.

Her office is just as she left it. Someone has been in to clean because no surface holds dust; even the picture frames on her desk are spotless. Her favorite is a blurry photo of Jane drunkenly flashing her Fields Medal at the photographer (Natasha) while Darcy is passed out on the bed beside her. Maria and Pepper managed to hold their own that night, but Darcy will never again drink Nat’s Russian vodka.

Looking away from the photo, Darcy considers the laptop on her desk. Tony replaced her old HP with Stark Industries’ newest model, razor-thin, sleek, and bright pink like she prefers. It really pays to be friends with a billionaire. She fires it up and is happy to see her settings restored exactly.

“This is _awesome_.” She looks up at the ceiling. “Thanks, Jarvis!”

“It is my pleasure, Miss Lewis. Welcome back.”

“Missed you, bud.”

“As did I.”

There’s a knock on her door, and Clint pokes his head in. He’s wearing his tac gear.

She frowns. “You heading out?”

“Nah, just got in.”

“Mission?”

“More of an errand,” he says. He flops down on the chair in front of her desk. “I’m gonna cut to the chase, kid.”

Darcy leans forward. “What’s up?”

“I was really fucked up after Loki, you know?”

She knows where this is going. “Clint.”

“No, hear me out. Loki did a number on me, held my brain hostage basically. Made me relive all the ways I fucked up over the years - and I fucked up a lot. I tried to go back to normal after the Chitauri shit, but I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat much. SHIELD referred me to a therapist - Agent Mahmood Museveni. He’s clean, works for Tony now down on level 47. And he’s ex-Marine, so he knows a thing or two about trauma. Go have a chat with him.”

“Tony really took in all the SHIELD orphans, huh?”

He smiles crookedly. “Something like that.”

“I’m okay, really,” she says softly.

“Are you?”

She shrugs. “Windows make me jumpy and I never wanna see a hospital ever again, but that’s pretty much it.”

“You’ve been sleeping with Jane.”

Darcy doesn’t ask how he knows that. She looks down at her desk, fiddling with a pen. “Two of the walls in my room are just glass; I’m not… there yet, but I will be.”

“You’ll get there faster with Mahmood.”

“I don’t know if I can talk about it right now. Maybe later on…”

He slowly reaches out to squeeze her hand. “One visit, okay? If you don’t want to after that, we won’t push.” He stands up.

She sighs. “Clint -”

He pops his hearing aid out of his ear. “I can’t hear you, lalalala.”

“Real mature, Barton.”

Clint reads her lips and cackles with laughter as he walks out.

-//-

Darcy slowly pushes his thighs apart, small hands firm on his knees. She kneels between his legs on the couch, looking down at him with the softest look on her face. It makes Steve blush for no reason at all. He strains up to meet her lips as she slowly pushes him back against the cushions. He looks up at her, spellbound at the sight of her long curls falling to one side of her neck like a curtain shielding them from the world. Sliding one leg over his, she straddles his right thigh and he curls one hand around her waist to tug her close. Her breasts press against his chest and a hot flush travels down from his blushing cheeks all the way to his groin. Palm flat, he places his other hand firm on her back, providing something for her to push back against as she squirms and settles solidly on him. He pulls away from her lips then and gently tips her head up so he can kiss down the soft slope of her neck. She makes little mewling sounds whenever Steve nips at her, so he makes sure to do it again and again, varying the pressure of his teeth as he kisses his way across her throat. He is concentrating on a particular spot on the hollow of her throat when she tugs on his hair - _hard_ \- to pull his head up. She tucks her head below his chin, kissing from the spot below his ear to his jawline before coming up to roughly tug on his lips. Her teeth are sharp and pinpricks of pain bloom across his bottom lip, making him groan.

Steve wakes up sweating, like sinners do, to an empty bed and a sick, empty feeling in his heart.


	12. Dessert

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, my intentions for the last line of the last chapter got a little lost in translation. Steve doesn't have latent Catholic guilt about premarital sexual activities or anything similar.

Darcy needs food, like, yesterday. She fell asleep on the couch last night, missed dinner, and woke up next to Jane at 2 AM. She’s jumpier than usual at night, but her rumbling stomach wins over her desire to avoid dark, empty places alone. She’s not hoping for much. There are usually no leftovers from dinner because superheroes have insatiably high metabolisms, which is totes unfair. Darcy, sedentary by nature, needs it more than they do. She sneaks out of Jane’s room and whispers a _thank you_ at Jarvis for lighting the way to the kitchen. Jarvis’ omniscience was creepy at first, but she’s come to appreciate it.

She enters the kitchen to an unexpected sight.

Sam is sitting at the island counter, nursing a bottle of beer and neatly cutting the crusts off a PB & J sandwich.

“Dude. Hey.”

Sam’s shoulders jerk up a fraction, the only indication that he’s surprised. He turns to her. “Hey, man.”

“I didn’t know you were coming.” She takes a seat next to him. The crusts are piled on one side, so she dips one in the open jar of grape jelly in front of him before taking a bite.

“Yeah, I, uh, have some work with Steve.”

“What about?”

“Just mission loose ends.” He points to his sandwich. “Want one?”

She knows a deflection when she hears one. “I got it, thanks.” She goes to the refrigerator to pull out a loaf of bread - white and unhealthy like she, Jane, and Thor prefer, not the whole wheat, nine grain crap the rest of them eat. She’s spreading a thick layer of peanut butter on a slice when she hears the quiet squeak of a house slipper on marble tile.

Natasha, looking unreasonably good in pyjama pants and a tank top, walks in. “Come back to bed before -” She stops short when she notices Darcy. Her eyes flick to Sam for a second before she levels Darcy with a calm, _so what?_ look, perfectly-shaped brow arched high.

 _“Busted_.” Darcy grins at Sam. He just looks shifty, as if he’s not sure whether he should look smug or sheepish.

Natasha laughs. “If you tell anyone, I will kill you in your sleep.”

“You don’t have to soften it with a laugh, Nat; I know you mean it.”

-//-

Dr. “Please call me Mahmood” Museveni has a pleasant face; the lines around his mouth are soft and friendly, complementing his warm green eyes. He is surprisingly young and _hella_ cut. Darcy tries not to focus on the abs she can practically feel rippling under his white shirt, or the way his rolled-up sleeves show off arms that are just screaming for her touch. So, sue her. Her last date was with a “video game reviewer” she met on Tinder who did nothing to slake her lust for Steve.

She and Mahmood talk for an hour. She means to cut and run at about the half hour mark, only to keep her word to Clint, but he doesn’t ask her probing questions like she was expecting, letting her steer the conversation instead. As such, they spend most of their time bitching about SHIELD’s non-disclosure forms and Coulson’s penchant for dramatics. When they do talk about the real reason for her visit, he seems to understand Darcy’s desire to downplay her capture and allows her to disguise her fears in humor and sarcasm. She leaves his office feeling lighter than she has in the week since her return from the hospital. She feels even better when she finds Steve waiting on the sofa outside. He’s wearing his usual tight, white t-shirt and khakis, baseball cap pulled low over his face. Hiding, then.

“Hey!”

Steve stands up, and up and up and up. Half the stress in her life stems from being around so many hot, tall men. Specifically, this hot, tall man, who has no business smiling at her the way he is doing now. He’s asking her something.

“What?”

“How did it go?”

“Oh. It was good. He’s nice and really funny. We bi - we complained about Phil and SHIELD NDAs.”

He laughs, “I’m surprised you fit that into one hour.”

She presses the up button to call the elevator just as he presses the down button. “Are we going somewhere?”

“It’s a nice day; I thought we could go out for lunch.” Steve sounds nervous.

“Oh, am I allowed to go outside now?”

He looks guilty. “You’re allowed out.”

“Sure, but there’s always some excuse for me not to go.”

“Darce -”

“Don’t insult my intelligence, man. Pepper brought in an entire store’s catalogue so I didn’t have to go out to shop for sneakers,” she says pointedly.

He’s saved from answering by the ding of the elevator approaching.

Feeling she has made her point, Darcy drops the topic. “Where are we going?”

“Anywhere you want.” He looks relieved.

She narrows her eyes suspiciously. “Is this a bribe to keep coming to therapy?”

He grins down at her. “Bribe is such an ugly word…”

-//-

They end up going to the Union Square Greenmarket, where a food cart that serves the best kebab platters in New York hangs out. They pick up some fruits on the way back. Steve visibly winces at the price of a basket of five oranges - $1.87 per pound. “That would be about $25 back when I was growing up. Buck and I -” he catches himself, “People would get them for Christmas.”

He looks so far away, Darcy’s heart clenches in her chest. He doesn’t talk about his life before the big freeze much. “That must have been hard,” she says quietly.

His answering smile is sad. “The Depression took no prisoners. But it wasn’t all bad.” He shakes himself out of his memories like he always does. “Let’s get some ice cream. My treat.”

She wishes he would be more open, but goes along with his diversion. She pulls him by the elbow towards a froyo stand instead, knowing she couldn’t move him an inch if he really didn’t want to go. It’s kind of hot. “Have you ever had froyo?”

“I don't even know what that is…”

“Yogurt actually worth having. Let’s go. _My_ treat.”

Darcy gets a cake batter and caramel mix in the interest of being as unhealthy as possible to counteract Steve’s vanilla and fresh berries combo. He looks at her bowl in poorly disguised apprehension, but takes a large spoonful when she insists he try hers.

“So, that’s how it is? Pretending to be all bran flakes and lean meat like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, while eating half my froyo.”

He smirks. “You got me pegged, Lewis.”

“Mhm. You only think you’re complicated, Rogers.”

At the next intersection, he disposes of his cup and shifts the basket of oranges to his other arm. It takes another two blocks for Darcy to work up the courage to take his hand in hers. Steve looks surprised but pleased. He squeezes her hand, a barely-there pressure that leaves her breathless and wanting.

-//-

Darcy had planned for a quiet birthday, but she had not factored in Tony “I only drink socially now and dinner is a social event” Stark. Sometimes she thinks it would be nice to be as mysterious as Natasha. No one even knows when her birthday is.

She’s checking herself out in the steel statue of Iron Man in the lighted alcove across from the elevator - natch - when Tony strolls in, velvet blazer, Bvlgari watch, and all.

“Lewis. What do you want for your birthday? New car? Plane? Do you like art? Never mind, you can tell me after. Let’s rock and ro -” Tony looks horrified. “ _What_ are you wearing?”

A gas station tank top that says _TEXACO_ across her boobs.

“The pièce de résistance of my unpaid intern chic line, imported all the way from New Mexico.”

“Disgusting. Go wear something indecent so I can tell you you’re not leaving the house dressed like that.”

“I’m not taking fashion advice from a man who wears five-toed running shoes.”

“They’re my Avenging shoes!”

“They’re a travesty, old man.”

“We’ll talk about how wrong you are later. _Go_.”

Everyone is waiting around the elevator when she returns wearing her best off-the-shoulder top. It has a dangerously low neckline and lace cutouts.

“You are _not_ leaving the house dressed like that, young lady.”

“Don't be a misogynist, Stark.”

 -//-

The party deck a few floors below the residential areas is outfitted like Pepper’s designer got his ideas from a 20-something hipster’s Friday night mood board on Pinterest. Still, Darcy can’t deny that she loves the big light bulbs draped artfully across the pagoda over their heads or her two signature cocktails. Well, the idea of two signature cocktails. In actuality, they are both disgusting - sickly sweet and tart at the same time - and she would ordinarily never be caught drinking either.

“This is revolting.” Jane is practically retching at the taste.

“You’re just jealous, Janey, because your birthday party was in a lame planetarium.”

“Thor going down on me for 45 minutes under the Hayden Planetarium globe has been the highlight of my personal life so far,” Jane says primly, fishing an olive out of Darcy’s martini.

 _Straight for the jugular_. “Bitch.”

“If you're so hard up, why don't you pick up what Steve is clearly putting down?”

Thor joins them before Darcy can respond. “Yes, it has not gone unnoticed that Steven courts you.”

She blushes, “He does not _court_ -” Thor looks at her like, _are you for real right now?_   “Okay, fine. I just,” she pauses. “Don’t know what his… intentions are. He’s kind of hot and cold.”

Jane rolls her eyes. “You need help. Like, mentally. Go to Steve, be of service to your country.”

“Oh, my _god_.”

“Give me your other olive first.”

-//-

It’s almost entertaining how uncomfortable Steve looks, standing in one corner with his back straight, like an army general is coming to inspect his bed any minute. The tumbler of Thor’s Asgardian ale in his hand is almost empty. He pretends it makes him tipsy so Jane and Maria will stop trying to get him drunk with Spirytus and Hapsburg absinthe combined. They’re experimenting.

Darcy hops up on the railing next to him, making sure her skirt rides up her thighs an inch when she crosses her legs.

He eyes her warily. “Don’t,” he mumbles. “You’ll fall.”

“I’m surrounded by Earth’s mightiest heroes, as the New York Times calls you. I’ll be all right.”

“I’m just gonna -” He steps closer and holds onto the railing beside her, ready to catch her should she overbalance. His hand is pressed against her bare thigh. Thank god she shaved all the way up there.

The song segues to something with a hard beat. She’s pretty sure his supersonic ears can hear her over the thumping bass, but she leans into him anyway, makes sure her lips brush his ear. The best thing about Darcy when she’s drunk is that she’s shameless.

“Here, swap.” Over his weak protest, she takes his drink and hands him her daiquiri. She takes a sniff of the ale and immediately feels lightheaded. “You sure this doesn’t get you drunk? I could get a contact high from, like, ten feet away.”

She sways a little and Steve steadies her with a firm hand around her waist. “Easy.” Still holding on to her waist, he swaps their drinks again with one hand, then tips the glass back to finish his in one swallow.

Darcy follows suit, hiccups, then jumps down. The song changes.

She holds out a hand. “Let’s dance, Cap.”

He suddenly looks so flustered, she almost regrets asking. “I’m not… I don’t, er, know how to dance.”

She curls her hand around his wrist, pulling. He resists for a moment before letting himself be dragged forward. “Good, I don’t either.”

“No, Darce, I really don’t know how to dance.”

“No one _knows_ how to dance nowadays, Steve. But I've seen movies and you've definitely seen Rita Hayworth films, so we’ll make do.”

She pulls him to the outskirts of the dance floor, a dark corner where they’re less likely to be seen. He still looks apprehensive.

“Pretend you’re Fred Astaire and I’m a light skirt, c’mon.”

He looks scandalized. “Light -! You’re not a light skirt.” He adds quickly, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” _Someone’s been reading up on third wave feminism._

“Don’t take me so literally.” She slides her hands up his chest and around his neck. He looks nervous so she asks, “This okay with you?”

Steve nods, seems to calm down. “More than okay, Darce.” He settles his hands on her hips, and doesn’t cop a feel through the lace like other men would do.

She steps closer so they’re pressed together. She can’t stop smiling.

“What now?”

“Now,” Darcy says, “We grind.”

“What?”

“I’m just messing with you.”

-//-

All in all, it’s a great birthday party, even though she knows only about fifteen people in attendance and most of them are her colleagues. They stay on the deck well past the last guest’s departure, watching the sun come up, still drunk on beer and Nat’s evil vodka. When they're all back to their rooms, Darcy stumbles into the kitchen for a glass of water, then decides to sleep on the couch in her party clothes because Jane’s room is so offensively far.

It seems like she’s only been asleep for a minute when she’s being shaken awake. She’s up and alert in a heartbeat, fighting hard against whoever is holding her until she recognizes the voice calling her name. She goes limp.

“ _Fuck_ , Steve.”

Steve smooths her hair back from her face, clenching his jaw when she flinches at his raised hand. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Her idiotic heart is beating a frantic tattoo in her chest and she wills it to calm down. “It’s okay; I scare easily.”

His face darkens momentarily at the thought. “You looked uncomfortable and cold. I thought I’d take you to your room.”

She yawns, remembering to cover her mouth daintily at the last second. “Good plan.”

He picks up her heels from the floor.

They walk to her room in companionable silence. Darcy is barely upright, lolling against Steve’s bicep. She’s still half asleep when they reach her room. When Jarvis opens the door, she is fully expecting Steve to follow her in, but he stays on the other side. She tugs on his arm; he doesn’t move and she ends up back against him instead.

“Stay,” she mumbles into his chest. His arms are so warm around her.

“Don’t think that’s such a good idea, sweetheart.”

“Every idea -” Darcy stifles a yawn, “- I have is amazing.”

Steve laughs, a low rumble in his chest that sends shivers down her spine. He slides a hand up the back of her head, fingers tangled in her curls. It pulls on her hair a little, but for once, she doesn’t mind.

“You’re drunk and asleep on your feet.”

She blinks up at him slowly. “I could be drunk and asleep on you instead.”

“Next time, when you’re sober.” He looks wistful.

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” she warns.

He presses a chaste kiss to her forehead, and steps back. “Please do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd love feedback on this chapter actually because I think the style and content are a departure from previous chapters and I feel so-so about it. But maybe that's just me over analyzing things as I am prone to do.


	13. Virtue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maria Hill is a superhero, fight me.

Steve rests his head against Darcy’s closed door, wanting badly to take her up on her offer. He wants to give in to instinct for once - not strategize, not think about consequences. He doesn't want to do right by her. He just plain _wants_.

A door opens across the hall.

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

It's Sam. Steve turns to face him with a sigh. “Nothing to tell.”

“Yet?” Sam asks.

“Yet,” Steve agrees. “She's… trouble.”

Sam leans back against the wall, crossing his arms. “Trouble you need.”

“Trouble I want,” Steve corrects. “I shouldn't.” Decent men don't fantasize about their friends. Decent men don’t fantasize about friends who are hurting. Decent men don’t take advantage of that uncertainty to flirt, to touch, to dream. His mother would belt him if she were alive.

Sam laughs for a long time, a disbelieving look on his face. “You’re in too deep for this bullshit, Rogers. You started this, day one.”

Steve smiles ruefully, “She turns my head.”

“What changed?”

“I don’t know if I’m good for her anymore, after all she’s been through.”

“Let her decide that. She’s not a kid.”

Steve huffs out a little laugh, “More than seven decades younger than me though.”

Sam rolls his eyes so hard, his whole body shows his exasperation. “All this masochism and you’re barely 28. I’m older than you, man.”

Steve closes his eyes and massages the bridge of his nose to stave off the headache he feels coming. “What do we have in common?

“If you can't find common ground with the people on this floor…” Sam says quietly.

“All I know is war, Sam.”

“She doesn’t seem to have a problem with that.”

“She doesn’t know any better,” Steve says heatedly. “She got hurt and I -”

“And you nothing. It wasn't ‘cause of you, and she got herself out of it.” Sam clasps his shoulder. “She could have left, Steve. After Thor, after Russia - she could have left. She chose to stay in this madhouse instead.”

When Steve is silent, Sam asks, “You got something against being happy?”

 _Sometimes_. “I should be focusing on finding Bucky.”

Sam gives him a hard look. “Don't fuck around with her. Make up your mind.”

“I’m trying.” He nods towards Natasha’s room, a little way across from Darcy’s. “Social call?”

Sam ducks his head and rubs the back of his neck, grinning, “Something like that.”

-//-

He dreams of her again that night. She's in the skirt from the party - high waisted and a pale, silky blue. Except, it's shorter this time - much shorter - because even in his dreams he's an asshole. She's perched high on the railing, legs crossed in a way that makes her skirt ride up to reveal the creamy tops of her thighs. She’s in one of the tank tops she wears around the house sometimes, tucked into her waistband. It’s pulled lower than usual and he can’t draw his eyes away from her. He walks towards her and looks his fill, because how can he not. Sitting on the railing, she’s at the perfect height to meet his eyes head on and it’s a damn cliché, but he’s lost in hers. When he reaches her, she crosses her arms behind his neck and her legs around his waist to pull him in. She never talks in his dreams, just smiles all mysterious and sweet. He tucks his head under hers, kissing her jaw. She shivers and runs a hand through the back of his hair. He stifles a moan by pressing his face into her neck. He clutches her waist tighter with one hand and despite every warning his brain sends, slides his other one beneath her skirt, all the way up her soft thighs to feel the lace of her panties. His hand is big enough for him to press his thumb against her core while keeping a firm hold on her so she doesn't fall. They stay like that for a while, his hands holding her fast and his thumb resting on her clit above her panties like a promise. She keeps playing with his hair and lets him burrow deeper into her neck. It should be sexual, Steve thinks, and it _is_ , but with her all but cradling him, he just feels comfort.

Comfort he misses once he wakes up, gasping. He's hard as bone because he's a jerk who can't keep his mind off someone he has no business wanting anymore. His shoulders are tense in a way that will leave him sore in the morning. He means to roll over and go back to sleep, but his hand slips into his briefs of its own volition. As usual, he makes it quick and dirty because he doesn't want to give himself time to imagine any particular curvaceous brunette on her knees in front of him. He doesn't call out her name when he finishes, but it's a close thing.

He's never wanted anyone like he does her, not since what Tony calls ‘the big chill’. Not even Farah in D.C. Farah, who was kind and funny and kissed like a firecracker, who he thought he could fall hard for, given time. He never gets time.

_You got something against being happy?_

Steve makes up his mind.

-//-

Natasha and Clint are away on a long mission, something to do with old SHIELD friends who turned out to be Hydra operatives. Darcy does not envy whoever they are because Natasha had murder in her eyes when she left.

With Natasha gone, Darcy’s training comes to a standstill. She practices as much as she can with the foam dummy in the gym, but there’s only so much she can do with what is essentially a twenty-five pound pillow. She expresses her frustration when Maria is on the treadmill one day while Darcy pretends to lift weights. In response, Maria takes her shooting. Gun slinging in real life, Darcy finds, is not as easy as it is in movies. She has to learn the parts of the gun first, how to put it together and take it apart, and the science behind the combustion. When she’s mastered that, Maria lets her shoot. She nearly takes her left eye out when she forgets Maria’s warning about the kick back. It takes a few hours, but Darcy has the hang of it by day’s end, even if she’s far from hitting the inner circles on the target. Maria seems satisfied at any rate.

On the way back, they make an impromptu stop at a bar near the gun range, and order two rounds of shots before settling down with their drinks.

“We’ll start you with a Glock 19. It holds less, but it’s versatile and strong. Discreet. Then we move up to a 17. How’s that sound?”

“Fantastic,” Darcy says and means it. She’s more excited that she thought she would be given she’s never wanted to go near guns before.

“Do you have a thigh holster? Something small will do.”

“You must realize the answer is no.”

It’s almost funny that most of her friends assume everyone is always armed to the teeth. She knows Maria carries at least three weapons on her at all times and has many more squirreled away in different parts of their floor. Darcy only has a taser, one Tony built specifically for her for her birthday. She’s not sure it’s street legal.

Maria mutters something that sounds like, “What kind of woman doesn’t have a thigh holster…”

 _Fucking superheroes_.

-//-

Darcy is trying to string up a punching bag one day when Steve walks into the gym.

He looks taken aback for a second. “Darcy?”

She sets down the bag carefully. Her shoulders are _aching_. “You don’t have to sound so surprised.” She can’t help but be a little insulted.

“You're never in the gym, that's all.”

“Hey! I'm in the gym. I was boxing with Nat before - before.”

His face sours at the mention of her kidnapping. “You want some help?”

She nods and turns toward the bag again. He comes up behind her, effortlessly lifts the bag over his head, and clips it to the hook hanging from the ceiling.

“Now, that’s just unfair.”

He smiles at her, upside down because he’s still behind her. “This is heavier than usual. Any particular reason?”

She tries not to look sheepish. “I watched a kickboxing YouTube video and this is the type they used. Thought I should make like Tony and keep variables the same.”

He nods, “Good idea.” He’s still supporting the weight of the bag and seems to be flexing his biceps.

She decides taking a step back so she’s pressed against his chest would be too shameless. She turns to face him instead and smiles dopily back at him.

Steve clears his throat. “Uh, so, I could help you? Since Nat’s not here. If you need it, I mean. I’m sure you have the hang of it by now.”

Darcy senses an opportunity. “I could use a few pointers on my form. Nat is always correcting my stance.” This is a lie; Natasha rarely has to correct her stance anymore.

He looks extremely interested. “Yes, I could definitely help you with your,” he clears his throat again, “form.”

 _Nice_.

“Let’s get your hands wrapped.”

Darcy knows how to do it, but she is perfectly happy to sit while Steve wraps her hands with boxing tape. He’s exceedingly gentle, one hand carefully winding the tape while the other cups her elbow. She marvels at the difference in their hands. Hers are small and uncalloused unlike his, but her fingers are long and her nails are sharp. His hands are large, yes, but they’re very clearly the hands of an artist - smooth and precise with slim, nimble fingers. They’re delicate in their own way. She could watch him for hours.

When he’s done, she asks, “Did you get the pink tape because I’m a girl?”

Maybe it’s cruel for her to tease, but she can’t help it. The blue/pink dichotomy started after the 1940s, and she knows he still struggles to understand some new cultural norms. Just the other day she overheard him and Thor discussing how going out of one’s way to hold open doors for women could be misconstrued as sexist, something they learned from an old copy of Vanity Fair Pepper had laying around.

“What? No! It was closest -”

She leans back on her hands with her legs stretched out in front and her head tilted to one side, a fond smile on her face.

“All right, smartass,” he mumbles. He still doesn’t like to curse in front of women, but he’s coming around, slowly but surely.

He points to her sneakers. “Are your feet wrapped under there?”

She shakes her head no and he says, “You’ll need more ankle support with a heavy bag like this. Take your shoes off.”

“Neither of us want that, trust me.”

“I spent two years running around Europe with six sweaty guys, Lewis. Do your worst.”

-//-

Something changes between them after that. Steve is easier around her, lighter somehow. He still flirts in that soft, halting way of his; only now, it’s accompanied by his heated gaze. Darcy feels like she’s going to burst into flames whenever he looks at her. He’s bolder with his hands too, now that she reciprocates. Well, bold for him anyway - a touch on her back when they walk together, a brush of their fingers when he hands her the pepper shaker.

They sit across from each other during team dinner one night, pointedly ignoring their intertwined ankles. When they all migrate to Tony’s palatial screening room to watch _Goodfellas_ \- over Rhodey’s loud protests because he thinks the movie is overrated - Steve sits by her side. Natasha is on Darcy’s right, and she shuffles as close to Darcy as she can in an effort to push her closer to Steve under the guise of making room for Jane. Jane is approximately three inches wide and there is no reason for four people to sit on one sofa, but Darcy happily moves until she is almost on Steve’s lap. She rests her hand on his knee and his arm slips from the back of the sofa to curl around her waist. She thinks he kisses the top of her head, but she can’t be sure. Nothing goes unnoticed in a room full of geniuses, superheroes, and spies, but everyone seems to be conveniently busy passing out beer.

Steve walks her to her room that night. Darcy waits until Pepper and Tony get in the elevator to go to their apartment one floor below, then asks him to stay.

“I promise I won’t get fresh,” she teases quietly. “Your virtue is safe with me.”

Laughing, he readily follows when she pulls him into her room. “As long as my virtue is safe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chris Hemsworth once told Chris Evans that holding doors open for women could be seen as sexist.


	14. Pennies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm very sorry for the long wait between the last chapter and this one. Real life got in the way and I didn't have time to sit down to put pen to paper. Well, finger to keyboard. This one is quite short but it's also pure fluff, which I hope you will enjoy :)

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

Darcy laughs. “Come here.”

Steve leans back against the closed door, crosses his arms, and smirks. “Make me.”

“You really wanna play it like that, soldier?”

He immediately stands up straight, looking sorry. “No, ma’am.”

He reaches her in two long strides, and she goes readily when he pulls her close. She means to say something different, but looking up at him, what comes out is, “Hi.”

He grins at her. “Hi.” The look on his face is softer now, a little pensive.

She rests her hands on his chest, feels him up a little. When he continues to look at her quizzically, she asks, “Penny for your thoughts?”

He looks down at her and says, voice low, “Thinkin’ of you.”

“Worth every penny then,” she smiles cheekily. Stepping up on her tiptoes, she softly bumps the tip of her nose against his chin. “I wanna be on your mind.”

“You are.”

“All the time?”

“All the damn time.”

She can’t help but beam up at him. “You know,” she starts conspiratorially, “if you lean down a little, I can kiss you.”

The smile that breaks out on his face is delightful. Darcy vows to endeavor to keep it there every day. She's smiling too, so their lips meet awkwardly and there is far too much teeth. Both of them are trembling because this climax to their incomplete story feels significant in a way nothing else they've done ever will.

_Defeating Malekith, ruler of dark forces older than the universe itself? NBD, folks. Maybe, possibly, definitely falling for Steve Rogers? Terrifying._

She slips her hand up the back of his head, grabbing a fistful of his hair for a second. He moans. Her hypothesis proven correct, she does it again before sliding her fingers down his right temple, across his cheekbone, then pushing her thumb between their lips to push his face away. He follows her lips for more, but she shakes her head.

“Dude,” she says, panting. “I _do not_ have your lung capacity; I need a minute.”

-//-

Darcy is heaven on his lap, pleasantly heavy and warm all over. He followed quickly when she led him to her sofa, pushed him down, and flopped down on his lap. She taps his nose softly and says bluntly, “Let’s make out.”

He means to say _yes, please_ because he will never turn that offer down, but ends up blurting out, “I dream about you sometimes.”

She stops playing with the neckline of his t-shirt. The way she looks at him, head cocked to the side, pure glee on her face will be his ruination and salvation both.

“Sometimes?” she asks.

“All the time,” he amends solemnly.

“And what kinds of dreams are they, soldier?”

“The nice kind, ma’am.”

“Doubt.”

He lifts one knee up and drops it quickly, so she bounces once on his lap. Her tits bounce too; Steve is thrilled. “They _are_ nice. You're quiet, which is nice because you usually never shut up.”

She gasps, mock affronted. “Let’s shut _you_ up, cheeky.”

He’s flat on his back on the sofa in a second, Darcy having pounced on him. He’s a little stunned, partly because he’s hit his head on the arm of the sofa, but mostly because it’s been awhile since anyone has surprised him like that. He supposes certain reflexes of his are always a little muddy around her. They’re kissing before he can orient himself comfortably so he bends his knee up to push her forward on his lap; he’s not sure what he can and can’t do with his hands just yet so he leaves them safely at her hips.

When they next resurface an impressive 6 minutes later, Darcy sits up on his lap and gasps, “Solid A minus.”

Steve has an inkling as to what she’s talking about. “Er, I didn’t know I was being graded.”

“Gotta keep you on your toes, soldier.”

He concentrates on the way her long hair brushes her breasts. “Believe me, you do,” he mumbles. His eyes flick up to hers; she’s arching one eyebrow, looking expectant.

“Ma’am,” he adds quickly. She smiles; it’s dangerous to look at that too long, so he looks down again, feigning interest in the bulrush pattern of her shirt but actually wishing he could do a rough sketch of the way one particular section of her curls hugs the underside of her breast.

“Eyes up here, soldier.”

His eyes snap up to meet hers. “Sorry, ma’am.” He is not even remotely sorry and it shows on his face.

She grins, brushing her thumb against his lips. “Just kidding. Look all you want.”

“Oh, I plan to.”

“ _Yes,_ ” Darcy breathes. She leans down to kiss him, and Steve wants to pull her in so badly. Instead, he pushes her gently away.

“Just not tonight.”

He can tell he’s surprised her. “What -” she starts.

He lifts her off his lap, sits up, and deposits her gently next to him.

She crosses her arms and looks at him. “Explain.” He wants to kiss the pout off her face.

“I want -” He clears his throat. “This isn’t casual for me. I’ve done that and -” Steve picks his words carefully. “This feels different. It’s built up to something different. Do you agree?”

She looks at him, solemn betrayal on her face. “You have lured me here under false preten -”

His voice is soft when he pleads, “Darcy...”

Her face softens. “Sorry, emotions are... difficult. Sarcasm is my instinct.” She pushes his hair back, hands gentle on his forehead, then says, “I agree. This feels different for me too.”

The vice around his heart loosens slightly. Steve smiles dopily at her. “We’ve been pretty stupid.”

Darcy smiles dopily back. “Yeah. We could have had ages if you were a bit quicker on the uptake -”

“Me!” he interrupts her. “You’re the one who was slow on the uptake.”

“Patently untrue,” she says, nose in the air.

“I’ve been flirting with you since we first met!”

“How was I supposed to know you were flirting with intent!”

He looks at her, unimpressed. “There was some pretty heavy hinting on my part, Darce.”

She takes his face in her hands and pulls him close. “Steve-o, darling, I met the last guy I dated on Tinder and he sent me a dick pic after we texted for, like, 10 minutes. I'm going to need you to be more overt with your intentions in the future.” She kisses his nose, then lets him go.

If a dick pic is what Steve thinks it is… He puts that thought out of mind. “Noted.”

She scoots closer to him, pulls his arm around her shoulders, and settles herself comfortably against his chest. “So,” she says without looking at him, “I know we’re waiting to bang and all, but are you opposed to a bit of Netflix and chill?”

“What?”


	15. Bridges

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The faint beginnings of a tiny plot.

The morning is lovely outside her window. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, there is a dead weight on her chest.

_Um._

Darcy peeks open her eyes. It's an arm. It's quite hairy, though the hair is fine and almost unnaturally golden. It's practically glowing. _Why is Jane’s_ -  
  
She almost yells out in alarm at the rush of understanding. She had forgotten, for a minute, last night's Events. Capital E.  
  
She can't pretend she's not disappointed that she's still fully clothed, albeit in one of her more skimpy sleeping ensembles - flimsy, silk booty shorts and a lacy camisole that barely reaches the waistband of said booty shorts. Steve had been adamant about proceeding slowly and cautiously with their _relationship_ or whatever. Darcy understands, _she does_ , but one can't fault a girl for trying... Steve's face when she had emerged from her closet wearing her "pyjamas" was unforgettable, definitely one for her memoirs: _How I Almost Seduced the Human Embodiment of American Ideals and Other Tawdry Tales_ by Darcy K. Lewis.

Still, she supposes it’s for the best that she’s kept her promise not to get fresh with him. Although, it’s certainly not Steve’s leg that’s pressed up so cozily against her ass. It leaves her in no doubt of his potential in bed and she could hardly be blamed if she were to turn and shimmy down beneath the blankets for a bit of… but it would be poor form. Stuck as she is between a rock and a literal hard place, she instead picks up the hand laying across her abdomen, threads her fingers through his, then kisses the outside of his wrist. That in itself is so erotic, she has to squeeze her thighs together to stop the low thrum of her pulse on her clit. She squirms uncomfortably on her side, willing herself to calm down because she’s not an animal for fuck’s sake. _Morning wood,_ Darcy huffs, looking down at herself. _There’s a whole forest down there_.

“It’s worse for me, trust me.”

Weeks of Clint dropping down from ceilings and yelling “Sneak attack!” in an effort to hone her flight or fight response is the only thing that stops Darcy from shrieking and jumping off the bed.

“ _Jesus_ , dude, give a girl some warning.” She turns to face Steve who actually does look as uncomfortable as she feels. He turns slightly away from her to adjust himself underneath his sweatpants as she looks on with interest. He flushes when he catches her eye and says, “So, uh, good morning.”

She leers at his crotch pointedly, “ _Good_ _morning_ indeed.”

He rolls his eyes and when he settles back down, she snuggles up to him. He’s strong and firm beneath her and she forgets, for the present, that she’s surrounded by glass and air and little else. Wrapped in comfort, she rubs her face against his chest and immediately regrets it. The dri-FIT cloth of his T-shirt feels terrible on her face; she can _feel_ herself breaking out. She hadn’t noticed before that he’s changed from the crisp cotton button up shirt and boxers he had fallen asleep wearing.

Darcy chooses her words carefully. “I didn’t think you would come back.”

Steve freezes in the process of sliding his hand under hers on his chest. “I didn’t realize I woke you up,” he says quietly.

She shrugs, counting the grey stone tiles on the ceiling. “You didn’t really; I went back to sleep right away. It was, like, what? 1 AM?”

“Just about. Sorry.”

She waves away the apology. “So, what, you needed a breather from all the cuddling?”

“No, that was nice,” he mumbles, staring at the ceiling like it holds the answers to her questions.

Darcy makes an expectant little noise in the back of her throat and Steve continues. “I just wanted to make sure things were good for the night. Everyone in bed, everything locked down, Dum-E sleeping soundly. That kind of thing.”

“You moonlighting as Jarvis now?”

“No, just - I’m, you know, _Captain America_. It's my job to take care of everyone.” He sounds frustrated.

She’s getting there too. She shakes off his arms and sits up, cross legged on the bed beside him. He sits up too, leans against the headboard with a long, drawn-out sigh. He reaches out for her but she bats his hands away.

“And who takes care of you, you megalomaniac?”

He shrugs. “I’m all right.”

“Try again when you stop disappearing every other night on your Harley.”

Steve is quiet for a long moment. “Has anyone else noticed?”

Darcy shrugs. “You live in a house full of spies and insomniacs. And Jarvis.”

He suddenly feels the need to explain; he’s never done before, not when Jane caught him sneaking back in at 3 AM as she was similarly sneaking back in from an early morning satellite adjustment. The kind Darcy had expressly forbidden. “I won’t tell if you won’t,” Jane had said guiltily. He was just grateful she didn’t ask him where he went.

Darcy, of course, has no such qualms about privacy. “So, where do you go after tucking everyone into bed?”

He sighs again. “Mostly to the L.I.E. The highways are quiet at night and a long ride helps me make sense of things.”

She joins him in tracing the swirling patterns on her bed covers with her finger. “So, after a long day of work, you go out to… think about work?”

He laughs, but it’s sad. “I don’t really know how to do anything else, Darce.”

“Neither do I, nowadays.”

The expression on his face isn’t abject misery exactly but a fairly good approximation of it. She's sorry she put it there.

“We could learn? Together, if you want.”

“I want.” The way he looks at her makes her heartbeat speed up so much, she feels winded.

Steve pulls her into a kiss, but she pulls away after a quick peck.

“Hold that thought for one second because I just gotta ask; do you iron your sweatpants?”

“No.”

“How do they have creases!”

Steve’s laughter bubbles out of him in waves and he laughs harder than he has in years.

Darcy scowls. “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Let’s get ready for the meeting, come on.”

-//-

“Team meeting officially in session.”

“Someone take that gavel away from her.”

“Someone give Tony his bottle.”

“Mom.”

“Tony.”

“Children,” Natasha says, her voice dangerously sweet. “Play nice.”

Darcy sticks out her tongue at Tony when Nat looks away, then quickly sobers at Jane’s murderous look. “So, now that a certain petulant child here has settled down -”

“Darcy.”

She rolls her eyes at Jane. “Fine.” She clears her throat, turning back to everyone sitting around the large table in the war room. “Jane has an announcement to make.”

“Finally,” Jane mutters under her breath before announcing, “I want to open an Einstein-Rosen bridge.”

Silence follows. Thor, already paying rapt attention because Jane has the floor, sits up even straighter than his royal upbringing taught him. “I did not know you were this close, my love.”

“I had a breakthrough last night after I fixed my magnetohydrodynamic generator, which Tony broke -”

“Improved,” Tony interjects.

She spares him a second for a glare. “Erik will be here tomorrow. Atmospheric conditions will be right tomorrow too and, NASA forecasts show, a week from now. After that, it could be a week of rain, which will mess with the electricity in the air of course.”

“I could change that if you so wish,” Thor tells Jane.

Jane smiles at him indulgently.

Darcy catches Maria’s eye and giggles.

“Thor can help me create a backup plan with Heimdall but,” Jane looks around the room and takes a deep breath as though fortifying herself. “I want everyone here in case things don’t go as planned and, uh, Jörmungandr comes barging through here instead.” At Steve’s alarmed look, she adds hastily, “Just an example, not a probability.”

Darcy indicates the packets she had carefully collated last night, “You’ll find explanations - in layman's terms - of the process of opening the bridge and its possible ramifications in the report in front of you.”

“You know,” says Tony pleasantly, fingering the embossed Avengers seal on the report cover, “I’m getting tired of redecorating after everyone takes turns inviting their arch nemesis to come heckle the Tower.”

“Excuse me!” says Jane, indignant. “I have not once -”

“Oh, did I _imagine_ the guy calling himself _Radioactive Man,_ ” he says the title disdainfully, “blasting his way through _your_ lab to steal _your_ thingamajig last month?”

“Laser ablation system,” Jane corrects. “And that was just as much your fault, Tones; he wanted an Arc Reactor too.”

“Technically,” Darcy interrupts, “that was Bruce’s fault for inviting over a mad scientist he met once in China.”

Bruce looks at her, weariness on his face, “Your eagerness to throw me under the bus is, as ever, refreshing.”

Darcy smiles at him beatifically. She turns to Jane again. “You’ll have to do it before Clint leaves to visit his secret family.”

Clint barks out a laugh. “Secret family?”

“It’s been about three weeks, the usual time you spend here before going back to wherever your family is,” Darcy says matter-of-factly.

Everyone laughs so uproariously that she has to stifle a pout.

“He disappears for weeks sometimes! There are toys in his room -”

“When were you in my room?!”

Darcy ignores this. “- And paint in his hair.”

Steve just stares at her.

“Ipso ergo: kids.”

“Passing over your delusions, Darce,” says Clint, “What’s the second order of business?”

“Governor wants to commission someone to design a mural of you guys in Central Park to celebrate the two-year anniversary of the Battle of New York.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“That he’ll have to pay one-time licensing fees to use your trademarks, but the money will buy health insurance for first responders who -”

“You trademarked us?” Steve asks her.

“Yes, yes,” Darcy waves her hand impatiently. “Forged your signatures and everything, it’s all very legal.” Tony had already trademarked Iron Man, but she had a fight with the army over trademarking Captain America, Black Widow, and Hawkeye. The court ruled in her favor though; the army didn't have automatic jurisdiction just because SHIELD died.

"You forged our signatures?” Natasha asks with interest.

Steve groans. “Don't encourage her.”

Darcy shrugs. “You guys were taking down that arms dealer operating out of Latvia that week; I didn't want to bother you.”

“For the love of -”

Maria rolls her eyes at Steve. “Can we move on from the mural? I want to show you guys the latest photo releases from Steve’s _Captain America wants YOU to stay in school_ campaign.”

Everyone eagerly turns to Jarvis as it projects the photos. They're life sized and preternaturally embarrassing.

-//-

The end of her world begins with a brilliant show of light, a rainbow of colors Darcy has never seen before. She wants to cry because it's beautiful and her heart is full of pride for Jane, for the work she has done, for how she has changed humanity forever. There is no time though because thirty seconds after the bridge opens it becomes clear that something has gone very wrong.

Interspersed with the rainbow is bits of what Darcy can only describe as static. It’s ethereal but she is immediately afraid. Bewildered, she looks at Jane who is frantically turning the dials on the calibrator. Darcy isn’t sure that will be enough to control the destination of the bridge. It’s clear that the rainbow bridge hasn’t reached Asgard like it was designed to do when, instead of Sif and the Warriors Three as planned, a terrifyingly giant, blue _thing_ lands on Iron Man’s landing pad.

The impact shatters the small, circular deck. The Frost Giant tumbles down and smacks face first onto the Quinjet’s landing pad one floor below. The concrete holds for the moment, but Darcy isn’t sure how long it will last. She floats for a heart wrenching second before she drops too. She’s glad they decided to do this after the Tower is empty so no else gets hurt. She recognizes dimly that she shouldn’t be worrying about these things while she’s hurtling through air and seconds away from a fate similar to that of the icy giant - except the impact will leave her dead instead of enraged like the giant is. She squeezes her eyes shut because she really doesn’t want the last thing she sees to be cold, grey concrete. It’s a terrible way to go, particularly because Darcy really doesn’t want to _go_ anywhere. She and Steve have plans to make out tonight.

The collision she’s bracing for doesn’t come. She’s snatched out of the air at the same time she sees Mjölnir hit the giant looming above her with enough force to shatter his icy armor. The armor explodes and rains shards of ice all around her. The sound disorients her and leaves her ears ringing. She doesn’t know up from down, just that she’s falling again but this time in Thor’s safe arms. At least she won’t die from the fall. The pain in her ribs might kill her though.

Thor flies through a huge, broken window into the living room one floor below the ruckus - a little too roughly for her liking. Still, she can’t complain; he just saved her life. She’s lucid enough to assure herself that everyone is fine. Jane is bleeding from her head, but standing on her own.

Darcy takes one step towards Steve who rushes to her, says, “Will you _relax_? I’m fine,” in response to his concerned yelling, then promptly faints in his arms.

_How poetic._


	16. Quiet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's just fluff, man. I'm sorry for the long wait. Real life got in the way. I got a new job and moved to a new city so it has been hectic to say the least. I hope you enjoy this. The next chapter will come much sooner than this one did xx

Darcy has never met Loki.

Darcy has never met Loki, but she knows him; megalomaniacal sociopaths are all the same. The photos and footage she has seen of him repulse her. The way his beautiful, slicked back hair didn’t stray an inch as he gouged out a screaming man’s eye, the way he bared his teeth when he smiled, the other-worldliness he exuded even through the lens of a stranger’s shaky iPhone camera. The way he walked with his back straight and chest out - secure of his place even in a world that isn’t his. The nauseating brightness in his eyes when he talked about purpose, and freedom, and _the subjugation of her people_. Some of whom call him attractive or misunderstood or, most bewilderingly, worship him as a god. Thor calls him a hero, Thor calls him Brother. Darcy calls him revolting.

She knows he saved Jane’s life. She knows he sacrificed himself for Thor, impaled on a monster's sword as he saved the brother he claimed to hate. But did he? Asgard has not been as peaceful in Thor’s absence as he would like to think. Loki was not universally mourned among his peers; the feast in his honor was ill attended. Thor seems to have pushed these as trivialities to the back of his mind. He commissioned a life-sized statue of Loki to be carved into the side of the mountain Nótt, named after his grandmother, because heroes are celebrated in Asgard.

Darcy thinks of the thousands he killed in the city she now calls home. The many more who died elsewhere because of his machinations. Murderers are not heroes.

Darcy has _such_ doubts, but Jane will not hear them and she dare not bring them up with Thor, who still mourns his brother two years later. As she sits by Maria on the couch, she ponders this: who could have sent a Frost Giant to Midgard without Heimdall knowing beforehand? Who could have known about Jane’s plans to open a pathway between the realms when the tight lipped Allfather only gave his approval on condition of total secrecy? Who could have cloaked a Frost Giant past all-seeing, ever-vigilant Heimdall?

Darcy can only see one answer. Stranger things have happened in her new world.

She wants to bring it up, but there doesn’t seem to be a right time. Two weeks later, the nightmare of the Frost Giant seems to be over. She has recovered from her blood loss-induced fainting spell, but Jane and Sam still have concussions and Maria is still on bed rest, recovering from broken ribs. She’s currently patiently teaching Thor to play Battleship, but Darcy can tell she’s flagging. The medication and ache in her ribs tire her out easily and it’s getting nearer to the bedtime Helen prescribed.

Darcy watches Maria leave for bed until she’s out of her eyesight. Jarvis will tell them if anything is wrong.

“A penny for your thoughts, Darcy?”

She looks around at Thor. He offers her a white peg to continue Maria’s game. She takes it with a smile. “They're worth more than a penny, thank you very much.”

Thor nods solemnly. “An Ivaldian taser then? Made from uru and suffused with true lightning.”

Darcy considers the placement of her ships on the board, and Thor’s offer. “Save it for my birthday.”

“If you wish.” He leans forward to daintily place a pin on the board, obliterating one of her battleships.

Darcy swears under her breath and recites, “You sunk my battleship,” like the game’s rules require. “This is totally not fair. You're a brilliant war tactician and I am just a lowly -”

“If you are a ‘lowly’ anything, little sister, I will eat my hat.”

She grins at that.

“You don’t have a hat, silly.”

“My hammer then.”

“The day you eat your hammer, I’ll eat _my_ hat.”

“Which one? You have a fair many.” Thor chuckles at his own joke, eyes bright as he reviews the board before him. He’s clearly in a good mood.

It’s now or never, she decides. “Speaking of Mew Mew, how’s the Frost Giant?”

He sighs. “Still refusing to speak. We have imprisoned him for now. We cannot do much more under Asgardian law given that his… visit did not cost any lives.”

Darcy can see, dimly, where this conversation could end up, but hopes it will not. “Your dad or Heimdall still have no leads as to who or how he came into direct contact with Jane’s bridge?”  


“No. I have spoken to the Frost Giants; they do not know why one of their own would wish to violate the peace agreement my father had brokered several Earth years ago. They no longer have the resources to fight Asgard since half their realm was ruined by the Bifrost.”

“Jötunheim was not ruined,” Darcy corrects him quietly. “It was destroyed by Loki.”

Thor nods gravely. “He was… different then. Tortured by his past and my own youthful arrogance. He was a different man when he…” He looks away from her and out the windows without really seeing the glittering city below them.

She puts a hand on his knee to comfort him in some small way even though she knows it’s inadequate in the face of his pain. She has no siblings, but it would hurt her the same to lose her chosen family.

He covers her hand with his, squeezing hers reassuringly.

She takes a deep breath. “Do you think - do you think it’s a coincidence that, um, a Frost Giant came here? I mean,” she hastens to explain when he looks at her, surprised. “Jane’s bridge looked exactly like the Bifröst until the Giant came through. And Loki is the only one who has the connection and enough pull with the Frost Giants to get them to break the treaty. What if -”

“That’s enough.”

She retracts her hand quickly from under his at the quiet aggravation in his voice.

“You thought him dead once when he wasn't,” She continues, hurried. “What’s to say he -”

In a controlled voice, Thor says, “I said, that’s enough.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Bruce soundlessly leave the adjoining kitchen.

“Thor -”

“I saw him die!”

She jumps a little at the look on his face when he turns to her. His eyes are overbright and his mouth is set in a guilt-ridden scowl uncharacteristic of his nature. He continues, “I saw him bleed out on my lap. I stroked his hair as he apologized, as he told me he did this for me, as he told me he didn’t need the honors that come with sacrifice in battle.”

“ _Thor_ -”

“Jane has told me of your suspicions; I hoped they were one of your many clever musings. I did not think they ran so deep.”

Stung, she says, “You have always trusted my _clever_ _musings_.”

Thor raises a hand for her to stop. “I do not wish to speak of this again.”

Darcy’s annoyance flares. “Why are you being so obtuse? Are you so willing to think that the universe is at peace that you’ll ignore the signs? People are not _happy,_ Thor. You have staved off _battles_ in all the realms, not war. Don't be so blind. There is still discontent ripe to be exploited!”

“I do not delude myself that the universe is at peace, Lady Darcy.”

Oh, she’s _Lady Darcy_ now.

Thor continues in a carefully calculated tone. “I am aware of those who will harness that discontent for chaos. However, my brother is no longer one of them.”

He stands up and says, “Forgive me; it is late and I must check on Jane.”

Darcy knows when she has been royally dismissed. She grits her teeth as she stands up as well. “I hope you will consider what I said,” she says tersely.

She walks out before he can respond. There are tears gathering in her eyes as she stalks back to her room, but she refuses to blink and let them fall. They’re borne of frustration and nothing else. She’s at a stalemate with Secretary Ross who is asking her questions Tony will not want to answer, the world is equal parts grateful and hateful of the Avengers, whispers about a human who can hold an Infinity Stone without perishing has reached her ears and she’s not sure who she wants to go to with that information, Phil won't tell her what the fuck an Infinity Stone is anyway, Steve has been gone for -

Steve is in front of her room. He’s leaning against her door frame, arms crossed across his chest, and a frown on his face. His stealth uniform is streaked with mud and what looks to be the refuse of a butcher’s shop. She’s becoming uncomfortably accustomed to her friends coming home covered in filth and blood.

She wants to throw herself dramatically into his arms, but walks sedately to him instead. _Adult._

“You’ll have to do better than this to seduce me tonight, I’m afraid,” she says to him as she approaches the threshold.

“Seduction is the last thing on my mind right now.”

“Pity,” she returns. “It’s the first thing on mine.”

Steve smiles wryly, “It usually is. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” The door glides open. She walks past her small living room straight to her bedroom, shedding clothing as she goes, and says without looking back, “Don’t drip blood on my carpet.”

As she slips into her most comfortable pyjama set, she wonders just how much she’s willing to cry in front of Steve. He’s already seen her at her worst in that grimy hospital gown with her braless tits flying all over the place, but she’s never been overly forthcoming with her deeper emotions and their relationship is still in its early days yet. She’s considering going through the bother of night moisturizer when she spots Steve watching her from the doorway to her room.

He’s stripped down to his boxers.

She turns towards him, hands outstretched, as he comes to her. “Hello, handsome,” she addresses his beautiful chest before looking up at his face. She reaches up to touch his cheek, but he backs up a step, shaking his head.

“I’ve had an external decontamination, but I need a good wash first.”

“If it will get you into my bed soonest, darling,” she sweeps her hand towards the bathroom connected to her bedroom, “by all means.”

She follows him into the bathroom and hops onto the counter, grinning wickedly at the bemused expression on his face. “Can I watch?”

“Yes.”

Having fully expected him to refuse to drop trou in front of her, she’s shocked enough that the tube of toothpaste in her hand slips from her grip.

He picks it up for her. “Be careful,” he says quietly. He sets it neatly beside her on the counter. Turning, he shimmies out of his boxers, drops them in the laundry hamper, and steps into the shower.

So it seems she’s lost this round of their game of sexual chicken.

Darcy watches water droplets run down the sides of Steve’s thighs, feeling both physically and metaphorically thirsty. The steam is going straight to her head, as is the sight of Steve holding her gaze as he soaps his shoulder. She’s writing poetry in her head to the suds of shampoo running down the back of his neck to the curve of his spine when the shower abruptly stops.

He wraps the towel hung over the transparent shower door around his waist and steps out. Not a drop of water falls outside the bath rug he’s standing on. That, more than anything, snaps her out of her trance.

“What!’ she yelps. “That’s it?”

Steve nods. “Military shower,” he says as if that explains how he washed his whole body - considerably larger than hers - in less than two minutes. He pushes his sopping wet hair away from his face. She holds out the hand towel that was hanging from the ring beside the sink. He crosses the bathroom and takes it with a grateful kiss. She pulls him flush with her by his neck, not caring that her shirt is picking up all the water on Steve’s chest. She’s wet everywhere.

She moans her loss when he steps back. “Steve…”

“Not tonight, please, Darcy,” he tells her softly before lifting her off the counter and setting her on the floor.

She wants to pout and ask him exactly which night will be good for more than light petting.

“Anything for a weary soldier to wear?” he asks.

“You can wear me,” she answers cheekily. She tugs him back to her bedroom. He clutches the towel to his hips to stop it from slipping off. From her dresser, she pulls out the sweatpants and t-shirt she stole from his room a few weeks ago.

Steve raises one eyebrow.

Darcy shrugs, unrepentant.

When he’s dressed, she turns back to face him. She wants to ask how his mission went, but the desperate way he clutches her and buries his face in her hair gives her pause. This mission was not fruitful.

She pulls him to sit cross legged on her bed. Kneeling behind him, she spends a few minutes thoroughly rubbing his hair dry, then kisses his wet head when he tilts his head back on her shoulder.

“You’re making me wet,” she tells him when he rubs his forehead against the side of her neck. His answering laugh causes him to lose his balance and they both fall back into bed with a huff and a shriek.

She pushes him off and he rolls onto his back. “Oof. This is _not_ how I imagined you on top of me tonight.”

Once upon a time, Steve would have sputtered indignantly at the insinuation, but alas. He has grown into 21st century humor.

Darcy shuffles on top of him, legs falling between his, and chin resting on his chest.

He strokes her cheek with his knuckles. He whispers, “I had to kill someone today.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers back.

Killing is unavoidable in their line of work, but it hurts him nevertheless.

He cups her face in a gentle caress, presses his thumb against her lips like a kiss. “Bruce said you were upset.”

“Bruce needs to keep his pretty little mouth shut.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Do _you_ want to talk about why _you’re_ upset?” She counters.

Steve smiles ruefully. They promised each other to learn to not be consumed with their jobs, but it’s difficult to practice. They’re working on it.

He sits up with a groan. “Come on, I’ll give you a massage. Your shoulders are up to your ears in tension.”

Always a glutton for physical affection, she settles in front of him, happily accepting his kiss on her cheek.

Steve rubs her shoulders and says, “Well. No wonder.”

Darcy can feel it herself. Her shoulders are so tense, she’s sure they’re vibrating beneath his fingers. Her entire body has been locked up tight since the Frost Giant’s visit. She hasn’t slept through the night since Steve left for his mysterious, classified mission a week ago - the day after it became clear she only fainted from a mild case of blood loss.

She hisses sharply when he pinches his thumb and forefinger into the space just below her neck. He might as well have stuck his finger into an open wound for how deep the pain shoots.

“Take a deep breath.”

She does. She closes her eyes and draws a long, slow breath. She fills her stomach, her chest, and her throat with air before letting it all out at once. When it’s gone, there’s finally space for him to knead.

“Oh, my God,” she groans. It simultaneously hurts and feels incredible.

“Christ,” he laughs softly. “How’ve you been sleeping like this?”

“I haven’t,” she grumbles under her breath, meaning to be sarcastic. It just comes out sad.

He assaults a spot half an inch lower and she jerks in her seat. He repeats it along her shoulders until his touch releases lactic acid in her rigid muscles like rain down a gutter. She rolls her head to the left, away from the area he’s kneading, offering more of her neck. Steve’s calloused, cool fingers dip beneath the collar of her shirt and Darcy jolts. Her skin sizzles at his touch. His knuckles graze the tendon in her neck that meets her back muscles. He does it again, harder. Then again, until he’s working with his elbows up, using a carefully measured amount of his body weight for leverage. It’s too much all at once. She tips her head forward and he correctly reads her hesitance. He stops touching her, slides his hands out of her shirt and off her skin. The cool burn of his touch remains.

She turns to him, smiling. “Thank you.”

He returns her thanks with a kiss


	17. Veronica

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love world building... The layout of the Tower is from here: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/thebetabranch/stark-tower-layout-t875.html. I have no guarantee of its accuracy. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy this one! Reviews would be nice. That's not a hint or anything...

When they wake the next morning, the Tower is in chaos. Not from their regular sources - otherworldly beasts or jealous ex-colleagues with delusions of grandeur in Jane's case - but from Pepper.

Apparently, Tony’s plans to launch a Stark Industries orbital tracking satellite, Veronica, has given her one too many PR headaches. The straw that broke the camel’s back is Tony’s revelation that along with the satellite itself, he will be launching the suborbital Iron Man: Mark XLIV, affectionately known among friends as the Hulkbuster. Maria has been juggling licensing and permit issues with the U.S. government, the FAA, and the Office of Commercial Space Transportation while Pepper juggles the public’s waves of outrage and excitement. The wave now is one of indignation as people ask themselves why exactly a civilian group is launching a military grade weapon into space with effectively a carte blanche from the governments of the world.

“They’re the Avengers” is evidently not a satisfactory answer for some.

Until now, Darcy has been happily oblivious to any issues concerning Veronica’s launch. Her involvement ended with alerting Phil Coulson and letting him, Maria, and Pepper deal with the fallout. Now, however, Veronica’s very existence is in danger, and without Veronica, where will Darcy be?

She disembarks the elevator on Pepper’s office on the 78th floor with Steve in tow and a carrier full of coffee cups. She suspects Pepper hasn’t had her 11 a.m. coffee yet. Really, it’s Tony’s fault for trying to reason with her after a morning of meetings with the California office.

Pepper’s assistant buzzes her through and Steve politely holds the door open. The scene in the large room makes Darcy snort out loud. Tony is sitting in a chair in front of Pepper’s desk, Bruce standing behind him with a hand on his shoulder as if in solidarity. Pepper is coolly surveying them both, her elegant fingers steepled in front of her. Maria is behind her, looking out of the window with her hands crossed behind her back.

Darcy sets down the four cups of coffee on Pepper’s desk when Pepper nods at her. Steve veers off into a corner of the office. She takes the seat beside Tony.

“Now,” she starts. “What’s this about my girl Veronica?”

Pepper takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I was told it was meant for tracking Avengers movements. I was told it would record gravitational forces and space things for Jane. But. Bruce told me today that there will also be a suit up there, fully outfitted with repulsors, arc reactors, and _missiles_ , which I then _had_ to include in this morning’s press release. People are not comfortable with this, as I could have very well told all of you, and now I have to explain to my shareholders and the Board why public opinion of Stark Industries has plummeted in two hours.” She takes a deep pull of her coffee.

“I don’t get the issue. We’re not doing anything evil with it; it’s a, uh,” Tony looks sidelong at Bruce, “precautionary measure.”

Pepper takes another big gulp of her coffee. It seems to give her strength to continue without screaming. “It makes us seem volatile, like we have to protect people from the Hulk.”

“We _could_ have to protect people from the Hulk, in case of an emergency.” Darcy reaches to squeeze Bruce’s hand. “Minding your pardon, Bruce.”

He shrugs.

“See?” says Darcy, “The good doctor understands.”

Maria turns to face them. “The good doctor,” she explains patiently with the air of someone trying to reason with a simple bitch, “also agrees that this is a PR nightmare even if -”

“Our stocks are doing great -”

She raises her voice to be heard over Tony. “Even if - _even if_ investors are lapping up this shit.”

Pepper straightens. “Right.” She presses a button on her desk phone, which looks like it belongs in a Star Trek reboot set in the year 3000. “I’m calling Suárez. He’s the PR genius. You,” she points her pen at Tony, “are going on Ellen to explain how this suit is going to rescue children trapped under rubble in Syria or the moon or _whatever_ and that’s why we don’t want oversight from the government.”

Darcy turns to Bruce. “And you, my friend, are going to Secretary Ross to explain to him why the Hulkbuster is super chill and not a threat to world security. Do _not_ call it the Hulkbuster.” She looks at Pepper for approval, who nods.

Bruce throws Darcy a nasty look. “Isn’t talking to Ross your job?”

“It’ll be more reassuring coming from the invincible Hulk,” Maria says. She thinks for a moment. “Don’t mention the invincible part…”

Bruce sighs. “Why don’t you give me a list of what I am and am not allowed to say.”  
  
Darcy nods in agreement. “Yeah, definitely don’t mention the reconnaissance part.”

Pepper looks at her sharply. “The _what_?” She growls.

Darcy shrinks a little in her chair and mumbles, “It can access satellite feeds and cell towers. Radio waves, security cameras, and the like.”

Pepper shrieks, “It can access _what_!”

Steve abandons the small Rube Goldberg machine on a console underneath an original Vik Muniz that has engrossed him this whole time.

“Reconnaissance?” He asks her with a small frown on his face.

“Yes?” Darcy says. “For my spies?”

“For your spies,” Steve repeats steadily.

She nods, confused by the shock on everyone’s faces. “Yes, for the spies I’ve been recruiting.”

Tony looks the most astonished of them all. “You have been doing what?”

Darcy huffs, “You _cannot_ be surprised. You said it was OK!”

Tony turns to Pepper quickly, “I swear I didn’t, Pep.” Back to Darcy, he says, “When?”

“When I told you in February that I wanted to hire some help and you told me to go nuts.”

Pepper glares at Tony.

Tony glares at Darcy. “I thought you meant, like, a secretary.”

“And why would I need a secretary? To help me think of new ways to politely tell Ross to fuck off?”

Pepper shooes them away then. “I don’t need to hear this. I want to know as little as possible about Avengers fighting business.”

She glares at them all, muttering darkly under her breath as they file out one by one.

Their group, now joined by Natasha and Clint, relocates to Tony’s office right next to Pepper’s.

After they’re settled and the situation is explained to the newcomers, Natasha asks, “Who are these spies?”

“People Phil trusts," Darcy answers her.

Steve rubs his hand over his face. “Phil. Of course.”

Darcy takes a breath to stop irritation creeping into her voice. “I’m supposed to be a font of information for you guys, except we didn’t have our own sources. Jarvis is great, but he can't be where people are physically. The Avengers react to events or base decisions on information from the CIA or the U.N., et cetera. Those people have agendas, commercial or political. I can’t trust them for unbiased information about, for example, Vibranium stores for you to recover when half of them hope to use it to make weapons. For world peace, of course.”

Clint asks, “Have you met your spies?”

“Well, those trips accompanying Jane to her conferences all over the world weren’t pleasure cruises.”

Tony sits up straight at this so he can look at her directly. “You have spies all over the world?” He asks, sounding awed.

Darcy squirms uncomfortably in her seat. She doesn’t like the look on his face. “No. Thirty total in thirteen critical regions.”

Maria whistles.

“You shouldn’t have met with your spies. They know who you are now and it’s never a good idea to reveal yourself,” Clint cautions.

Darcy laughs, “Oh, some of them think I’m a former MI6 operative named Russell and the others think I’m a pretty, French mercenary spymaster called - get this - Espion, working with the Avengers because I’m secretly banging _The_ Tony Stark, who has a well-recorded taste for young blondes.”

Tony makes a face.

Darcy continues. “The rest think they’re reporting to Phil. Taking on his physical likeness was a feat, let me tell you… That’s why I need Veronica. Information collected is written in codes that change every week and are unique to the operative, who sends it directly to V, who sends it to me in batches, not all at once. I decode it and share it with you. I worked on the system for months.” She's more than a little proud of herself.

Natasha frowns. “Will you tell us the codes?”

“No, but you’re welcome to try to break them.” Darcy invites her with an evil smile.

Natasha’s frown turns to a scowl. Everyone else has a similar look on their faces. “Why not?”

“My Russian _holiday_ taught me how vulnerable I can be. We can be. I don’t want all our secrets in one basket. We don’t open the floodgates if any of us gets captured and my lovely sources aren’t murdered. I’ve spent the better part of the year on this and I’m not about to let it fall apart so easily.”

Darcy looks around the room. Everyone is thinking hard. She lets them. She’s certainly given them a lot to think about. She would have preferred to tell them at a meeting she called herself, while Thor was not at Asgard and she had concrete information to give them as examples, but this went much better than she had hoped. She’d half expected to be thrown out on the street.

“So, who are you spying on?” Steve asks. There’s only curiosity on his face.

Darcy smirks and pats his cheek. “That’s need to know info, babe.”

-//-

They disperse after their impromptu meeting. Everyone has tasks to do and Clint hasn’t slept more than an hour or two for the last three days during his mission.

Steve doesn’t talk on the way back to the common rooms, but doesn’t pull away when she slips her hand into his. Not angry then.

They have lunch together on the deck in companionable silence. She doesn’t feel the need to fill the time with gossip and chatter. She enjoys her sandwich in the early summer sun, which isn’t yet hot enough for the New York humidity to be overwhelming. When they’re done, he puts their plates in the kitchen sink, then takes her hand.

They’re back in her rooms and Steve has her pushed up against the front door in a second, kissing her long and hard. Darcy trembles at the suddenness of it. The desperation and need in his body has never been this deep before. His hands roam places he’s been careful to stay away from before - her breasts, her ass, the insides of her legs under her dress. If he’s surprised by the razor thin knives and small gun strapped to her thighs, he doesn’t show it. She tries to keep up, but finds she can’t. She kisses him back as best she can, tries to soothe him with her hands on his face, his hair, the small of his back, making him shiver.

When he squeezes her ribs a little too tightly, she squeaks. “Steve!”

He pulls back, a wild look on his face. She drops down from her toes but the floor sways beneath her. He holds her steady and pulls back so he can meet her eyes.

“You’ll be murdered on the street,” he whispers in a choked, hoarse voice. It makes her shudder for all the wrong reasons. She plays a dangerous game as a spymaster, but she doesn’t want to think about her murder or what that would do to her family, to Steve.

Darcy finally understands. “You know better than anyone that there are no guarantees in our lifestyle.” She looks down at his hands wrapped around her ribs. They look like they _belong_ there. “Russia made me come to terms with that.”

“I wish -” He stops abruptly. His body is tight and trembling slightly with tension.

She tries to conceal her alarm.

Steve starts again. “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job…” He says uncertainly.

“And I don’t want to tell you how to do yours,” Darcy says in turn. “But here we are.”

“But here we are,” he agrees.

She strokes his cheek. He closes his eyes and turns his face into her hand. She turns it back to her and kisses him softly on the lips. “What will come will come, Steve, and there’s nothing we can do about it except be vigilant and smart. Smart I am in spades,” she teases, tweaking his nose. “You stay vigilant. We stay together.”

“Together,” he nods firmly.

She can’t quite place the look in his eyes, but it’s exhilarating. Her heart fit to burst with a strange emotion she’ll have to examine later, she follows him into her living room.

From the way he takes off his sweater, it seems like he’s getting ready for a long make out. She would ordinarily take full advantage of his eagerness, but the day is young and she has a few questions.

“So,” she asks impassively, slipping off her holsters. “Why were you in Bucharest half of last week even though Maria sent you to Cologne?”

Steve seems to stop breathing. Darcy waits for his answer, feeling similarly tense.

“Are you spying on me?” He finally asks.

“I’m spying on everyone,” she responds bluntly.

He bites his lip, distracting her for a full few seconds. She mentally shakes herself out of it.

“I guess it’s time,” he tells her, “that I told you about Bucky.”

She pushes him down on her sofa, climbs onto his lap, and listens.


	18. Ultron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place during the Age of Ultron. You might want to read a synopsis of the movie on Wikipedia first. I took a lot of liberties with the movie and suited it to my needs, so it's not 100% in line with the movie or MCU's future plans for their characters.

Darcy thinks, in her way, that she has loved Steve since the day they met on that elevator. It's a silly thought of course; how can she love someone she didn’t know? No doubt, it stems from the reassuring weight of his head on her chest, the sensation of his arms wrapped around her in the light of the dying afternoon. She should wake him soon if they ever hope to sleep tonight at a reasonable hour, but she can’t bring herself to do it when he looks so peaceful. She has a strange impulse to shield him - from the past, from the future, from everything besides their present, their here-and-now. It settles in her chest, heavy and grasping and completely alien to anything she has ever felt before, this desire to protect him from his shadows and demons.

Steve told her about Bucky in the soft, cautious way he used to speak to her when they were first dancing around each other. It took a lot out of him and was similar to the conversation they had about Peggy Carter only a week ago - sorrowful but fiercely unapologetic. He gets stuck in the past sometimes, mired in the what-ifs, but she can see his determination. He wants to… not leave it all behind exactly, but set it aside as another life lived. She doesn’t know if that’s healthy, but she doubts anyone in this world knows how one should get over losing 70 years of one’s life.

Closure is difficult to achieve when there’s a lifetime and Alzheimer’s between Steve and the first woman he loved and his best friend, his brother, has come back to him in the most perverse way imaginable. A monkey paw’s wish if she ever heard one.

Darcy sighs and her breath on his face makes Steve frown in his sleep. He looks young and vulnerable and it reminds her that he’s barely in his 30s. He seems older when he’s Captain America, looking at maps with furrowed brows or watching footage of fights with his mouth set in a grim line, eyes calculating. The weight of the world has been placed on his shoulders and he assumes the mantle willingly, but he’s not much older than she is and she barely feels like an adult when she’s at her best.

Darcy looks at the clock on her bedside table, then laughs at herself. She has spent a half hour just thinking about Steve. The Darcy of old would have yawned away her sappiness. Now, she’s just content. Smiling, she looks down at what she can see of Steve’s face from  her angle. The setting sun outside her windows lights Steve’s hair on fire. He’s blindingly beautiful…

She traces one finger down the bridge of his nose, across the bow of his lips, and to his chin. His face twitches. Stifling a laugh, she does it again.

Darcy is halfway down the same path for the third time when suddenly, a hand springs out to catch her wrist. Steve looks at her with one eye.

“For future reference,” he says, “This is not how I want to be woken up.”

The way he is rubbing his thumb across her wrist makes her squirm.

Fighting to keep her composure, she teases back. “And how do you want to be woken up, Steve?”

“Allow me to demonstrate, Darcy.”

Before she even registers what he’s doing, he lifts himself up from her chest and rolls them over smoothly. One firm hand on her thigh and she’s on her knees, straddling his hips. She hardly has time for a breath before he pulls her down for a kiss. She can’t be certain, but she thinks he means it to be gentle at first. But the change in angle pushes her down on his lap, he groans, and they both lose control of the kiss. She pushes him away for a second, laughs breathlessly, then surrenders to him happily.

-//-

The labs are quiet today. Bruce, Tony, and Jane - Darcy’s intrepid scientists - are out shopping for metal sheets and lasers and stuff. Normal human things. Pepper is still in her office even though it is just shy of 6 in the evening. The others are in the battle practice gym in the basement because they are meatheads who like sparring in their downtime. Darcy declined to join them in favor of reading through Veronica’s reports. There’s a particularly promising one whose subject line she had barely deciphered before Steve had walked into her office to ask her if she wanted to practice with them. She had considered - his powers of persuasion, as she calls his biceps, looked amazing in his workout gear - but her spies have been particularly busy this week and she has a mountain of reports to dilute into something coherent and presentable to the Avengers.

She reads the decoded message from spy #17, code name: Hlökk, again. She frowns. Time to assemble, it seems.

-//-

Darcy has prepared the war room by the time everyone gathers an hour later. The air shimmers with the blue light of Jarvis’ projections - a photo of two men, a hologram of a scepter, two maps, a diagram, and a 3D floor plan.

Maria is the last to arrive. Darcy pats her on the head as she sits down at her right. She’s the first to get the write-up Darcy hands out to each person in the room.

It contains the message from Hlökk, decoded and written out painstakingly in Darcy’s own hand. She will burn all copies after the meeting. She won’t repeat SHIELD’s mistake of keeping digital copies of surveillance information. Not for the first time does she thank the gods that the Avengers aren’t bogged down by protocol.

There’s silence in the room as everyone reads the message. When Thor looks up at her, eyes shining in triumph, she grins. Darcy gestures to the hologram of Loki’s scepter, and begins.

-//-

The Avengers suit up while Jarvis readies the Quinjet. Thor is the first to finish since all he needs is to go out on his landing deck and call some lightning. Darcy is still not used to seeing him become _The Mighty Thor._  Jane is a blur of blue as she runs to him. Darcy walks past their thorough goodbye, resolutely ignoring the way Jane is basically climbing Thor. Not that Darcy blames her in the least… Jane will be in Brazil when the team returns in two days, if all goes as planned.

The locker room is quiet. The only sounds are the various clicks and bangs of everyone putting on their suits and checking their laces twice. Darcy doesn’t want to bother them, so she leans quietly beside Steve’s locker while he straps and buckles himself into his suit, determination etched into every line of his face. She knows this is a critical mission but her boyfriend is, like, so hot. She watches him tighten his thigh holster, which holds the handgun he doesn’t like to use. She’s… into it.

He picks up the holster that goes over his shoulders, which keeps his shield strapped to his back. Darcy holds out her hand. Steve hands her the holster, then turns around so she can buckle it on. She lingers a little; his ass truly does look spectacular in the suit. When she’s done, he turns to face her, follows her line of sight, and looks at her reproachfully. She ignores him. Looking around the room quickly first - it’s empty now - she steps onto his feet to bring herself closer to his face, then kisses him. Steve returns the kiss softly, then nuzzles the side of her face. Darcy sighs in pleasure; she wants to continue forever, but she steps off his feet.

“Don’t be a hero, soldier,” she tells him sternly.

“Of course not, ma’am,” he responds.

Steve squares his shoulders, takes a fleeting look back at Darcy, then strides out of the locker room to join the others.

-//-

For Darcy, the celebration party the night after the successful mission to retrieve Loki’s scepter is a blur. There is a healthy mix of people in attendance - Steve’s World War II veteran buddies, Pepper’s friends, models with PhDs, foreign ambassadors, Helen and her assistants - all people she likes and admires. Nonetheless, she’s glad when everyone leaves and she can take off her shoes and curl up on the sofa next to Steve. Nestled in the circle of his arms, she lets her friends’ jokes and banter wash over her, feeling calm for the first time in two days.

As usual, the serenity doesn’t last.

It seems one moment Darcy and Helen are giggling as they strain to lift Mjölnir together, and the next she’s standing in front of Helen, facing a murderous robot. She throws her stiletto knives with unerring accuracy into the pressure points of Tony’s Iron Legion robots, which are now inexplicably trying to murder them all in the name of world peace. The first one drops to the floor with all five of Darcy’s knives in its body. When another one advances on them, Darcy resorts to the throwing stars hidden under the piano. She’s less proficient with these, but she had not thought to bring a gun to a party in her own goddamn house. She’s lucky she even had her knives. She’s down to her last star when Steve jumps on the one flying above them, throws it to Thor, who demolishes it with his Hammer.

Clint throws Steve his shield, which Steve redirects to the last robot standing, cutting it in half.

Breathing heavily, he turns to them. “Are you all right?”

Darcy and Helen nod. Helen gestures to the big robot - Ultron? - who is giving another speech.

Her friends all look stunned. Darcy feels about the same.

After Ultron escapes, Darcy sits in a corner of the room while everyone voices their confusion, argues, and gets angry in turn. Her own anger is simmering just beneath her skin, but she keeps it on the back burner until they all see this through to its natural end.

They trudge off to bed silently. Darcy gives Tony and Bruce a wide berth as she catches up with Steve down the hallway. She expects him to stop at her door, but he keeps walking to his own room without a word to her.

She decides not to follow. She waits at her door for a second before she remembers with a painful lurch in her chest, that Jarvis won’t be opening the door for her. She presses her hand to the fingerprint scanning pad, blinking back tears.

-//-

The next few days are like nothing Darcy has experienced before. Her guilt clamps around her heart like a vice; she sent them all to the South African Coast based on a tip from Skalmöld, spy #4. She lays awake at night, trying to set the thought aside for the moment. It’s a fruitless endeavor; she can’t stop dwelling on the casualties of her bad judgement.

Her terror is paramount. She hasn’t spent a minute unarmed, even while asleep, since Ultron left them all with this mess.

She and Maria hunker down in the Tower and scramble to keep up with the people metaphorically banging on their door, demanding to know the location of the Avengers. There is not a moment of peace between the Avengers’ disastrous trip to Johannesburg, their sojourn in Clint’s farm, and the fight in Seoul. Darcy hears it all through the comms.

She can’t help but cry when they return home more or less in one piece. She had forgotten they were all human, that even Thor is not immune to death. The reminder is jarring.

She’s the first to reach the Quinjet when it lands. She wipes away her tears, but it doesn’t escape Clint’s notice.

“Those tears for me?”

She sniffs. “Yeah, for the tragic outfit you’re wearing.”

Clint laughs, but it sounds hollow.

In her periphery, she sees Tony gesticulating wildly to Pepper while telling her about Clint’s children.

Darcy wants to crow about how abso-fucking-lutely right she was about Clint’s secret family, but perhaps another time.

Maria leads them all to the war room, her eyes gleaming with purpose. Darcy’s eyes keep flicking to the door as Clint tells them that Natasha is in Sokovia. Darcy keeps expecting her to walk through the door and take her place at the table; she didn’t _really_ believe until now that Nat was captured by Tony and Bruce’s genocidal robot child. There’s a lump in her throat from how badly she wants Natasha back, how badly she needs her family to be whole again.

What she gets instead are two teenagers operating on a thirst for revenge. She doesn’t trust the Maximoff twins as far as she can throw them, but they need bodies on the ground in Sokovia, so she won’t advise the team to turn them away.

She wonders when she became the kind of person who sees two orphaned teenagers as soldiers in her war.

The others plan out battle strategies while they wait for Thor to return. Erik had advised them that he’s on his way. In the midst of the discussion, Bruce silently glowers at the twins. He doesn’t bother to hide his animosity and Darcy doesn’t blame him. She leaves them to it.

In her office, she fast forwards through Veronica’s surveillance of Baron Strucker’s castle since the night they regained Loki’s scepter. She wishes she could unsee the vast numbers of Ultron clones in the making. She sends the footage to the war room TV. She sits, unfeeling, for a while, then presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. Exhaling deeply, she rises wearily from her chair and goes to the others who are already watching the footage.

When she catches Steve’s eye, she asks quietly, “Captain, may I speak with you for a moment in my office?”

He gets up from his chair just as wearily as she did from hers. Pepper’s eyes follow them out of the room. Darcy resolutely avoids her eyes.

Once they reach her office on the other side of the labs, she closes the door and makes sure the glass turns opaque. She leans against the wall, hands clenched at her side. Her voice just shy of hysterical, she says, “This is insane. What you guys are going to do is _insane._ ”

“We’ve fought this many before. Aliens,” he replies as if that’s supposed to put her mind at ease.

“Yes, and Tony almost died!” She could scream.

He pinches the bridge of his nose. She’s never known him to have a headache, but it seems like one could be brewing.

“Darcy, we have no other options. Nat is -”

“Give me two days,” she asks him. “One day,” she amends desperately. “One day. I’ll call Phil and Fury; I’ll get more - more people -”

Steve shakes his head. “We can’t ask others to clean up our mess; you know that.”

Darcy looks away from his sad smile. He crosses the room and takes her in his arms carefully. She stiffens, half wanting to turn him away, but then relaxes, letting her body melt against his. She’s rubbing her nose against his neck when a thought occurs to her.

“Oh, my god.” She looks up at him in horror. “You’re going to die a virgin.”

His face flushes red, belying the casual way he says, “I’m not a virgin.”

She huffs. “Whatever. I’m not letting you go off to war looking so... so virginal. Not while I can do something about it.”

“You want to, um, do something about it now?”

The confused expression on his face is priceless. She would find levity in it, if her boyfriend weren’t going off to fight hundreds of murderous robots made of the strongest metal on Earth in about an hour.

“Is this the time?” Steve asks weakly, but Darcy is beyond words.

“Shut up and kiss me.”

Steve, the consummate soldier, follows the order.

The kiss goes from tentative to boiling in a second. Darcy is nearly vibrating out of her skin. She pushes him up against her desk, planting herself solidly between his legs. She leaves her hands on his thighs, stroking higher and higher in small increments until he’s muffling moans into her mouth. It doesn’t distract him from his own mission to map her breasts with his hands; she can’t exactly feel his fingers on her nipples through her bra, but she is rapidly getting there. She’s wearing a dress as she usually does these days for ease of access to her throwing knives. He’s in his suit, which makes their assignation more complicated than Darcy’s lizard brain can deal with right now. She pulls at it a little frantically; she has no idea how exactly he gets into this goddamned suit. He stills her by taking her hands in his, kissing her knuckles, and gently reversing their positions until she’s sitting on the desk and he’s standing between her legs.

“Relax, ok?” Steve asks her softly.

Darcy curses. “If you don’t fuck me right the fuck now, Steve Rogers, I -”

Steve kisses her quiet. “I will fuck you, but I gotta do something first.”

“What can you possibly -” She starts to ask exasperated. He cuts her off with a kiss.

He tilts her back, supporting her with one arm. With her arms around his neck and her chest pressed tightly to his, she feels calmer. She’s reeling a little from hearing the F word from Steve Rogers’ own mouth, so she doesn’t realize what he’s doing until his other hand has slid under her dress all the way up to her panties. She’s not wearing the sexiest pair she owns, but at least they’re not her period panties. She shudders as he strokes her clit through the thin cotton, building her up as slowly as he dares within their time constraints. She gasps when Steve tucks his thumb into her panties and pulls them to the side. His thumb is rough on her clit. She groans against his neck as he slides a finger in while rubbing her clit, making her squirm. She’s wet enough and her thighs are spread wide enough around his hips that his finger slides in without reservation. He lets her get used to that for a moment, then tests the waters with another finger. Darcy bites his neck.

Steve moans - quite loudly - and swears.

“Be quiet,” she hisses.

“Dreamed about this,” he whispers in her ear.

She kisses the underside of his jaw, nipping a little with her teeth. “Yeah?” She asks breathlessly as his fingers speed up inside her. “Just like this?”

He looks at her, eyes dark with want. “In my office.”

She shivers. He looks like he wants to devour her whole. She wouldn’t mind.

He curls her fingers inside her once more, then kisses her. “You good?” He asks.

She nods enthusiastically. _Finally._

In the blink of an eye, Steve drops to his knees, hitches her right leg over his shoulder, and, for lack of a better descriptor, dives right in.

When she moans in response, he moves his mouth off her clit and tells her softly, “Be quiet.”

Darcy narrows her eyes at him. There’s a glint of wet on his face. “Get up here.”

He smirks, an action so unlike him that her heart flips over in her chest. “Not yet.”

She thinks, on the whole, that Steve Rogers is a punk ass bitch.

He builds her up to a crescendo, using his mouth and his fingers, and sometimes just breathing her name against her pussy like it’s an epithet or a prayer. It feels like supplication or a declaration. She can feel the _I love you_ bubbling up inside her. She’s not sure if it’s only due to the oncoming orgasm; she suspects it isn’t, but she tamps it down nonetheless.

In the back of her mind she starts to worry about the time. As if he can tell, he pulls her closer to his mouth with a solid tug on her waist, and licks determinedly into her. She has to bite her lip to stop a loud whimper from tumbling out of her. She thinks she blacks out once she comes. When she’s next aware, Steve is gently resettling her panties and her dress, driving her mad in the process when his fingers brush her pussy and nipples and stomach again.

She pants into his chest for a moment before asking, “Where’d you learn to do that?”

He smiles at her, his eyes soft in complete contrast to the way he was looking at her just a minute before. “I told you I’m not a virgin.”

Darcy grins impishly. “Proved it too.” She trails one hand down his abdomen, intent on her final destination, which looks fantastic even when reigned in by the suit - his cock, she’s talking about his cock. She’s almost there when he gently moves her hand to side, so he can pull her in for a full bodied kiss. The taste of herself on his lips and the feel of his cock against the juncture of her thighs makes her moan. Her hand makes a run towards his cock again, but Steve firmly sets it on his shoulder.

Darcy groans impatiently. “Look, babe, Thor will be here any minute and I needed you to fuck me, like, a year ago, so…”

He looks at the watch on her hand. She looks too. They have 25 minutes until Thor arrives. They have ages.

“Next time,” he says quietly.

“What?! Why?” Darcy has heard some shit from guys in her time, but this is the most ludicrous.

Steve curls a strand of her hair around his finger and kisses her again. It’s quick this time.

“I gotta go talk to the team, Darce. Look over our weapons and comms.” He rubs his mouth. “And wash my face. And hands.”

He grins at her in a way that would feel lecherous coming from anyone else.

She can’t believe this is her life. She sighs.

“You promise?”

He looks startled. “Promise what?”

She looks at him steadily, trying to convey how serious she is. “That there will be a next time.”

Steve sucks in a breath as if she’s punched him. Her heart sinks.

“I can’t promise that, Darcy.”

She looks away. “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.” She pushes him away from her and levers herself off the desk, clutching it for support once she’s standing. Her legs are noodles. She winces at the wetness between her thighs; now it’s just uncomfortable.

She makes to head towards the door, but Steve clasps her hand. “No -”

Darcy bats his hands away. She’s never felt more irrational in her life.

“No! Listen. Darcy, please.”

She stops. Turns. Lets him pull her close by her elbow.

When he speaks, he does so slowly and deliberately. “These last few weeks with you - this last year and a half being your, uh, friend - have been surreal. I never thought -” His breath catches in his throat. “I never thought I would have this again.” He laughs darkly. “I never had it before actually.”

His face is fierce when he says, “I can’t promise you anything but my effort. Please understand.”

Darcy understands, but wishes she didn’t.

She takes a deep breath. “Don’t be a hero.”

Steve smiles. “I won't, ma’am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Darcy's spies are named after the Valkyrie.  
> Not sure how good my smut writing was, but I hope you still enjoyed it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading x


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